Rubber Resources

One of the other advantages was that the production of SBR was very cost-effective. The synthetic rubber was competing with natural rubber resources, especially in the area of the manufacture of tyres, which at the time were still solid rubber. Other countries began to duplicate the efforts and by the dawn of the subsequent decade, many developed nations were in the business of producing SBR for use in a number of products. 

Reproduced with permission from Rubber Resources BV., Maastricht, The Netherlands. 2014, Rubber Resources BV... 

Rubber Resources (Formerly Called Vredestein Rubber Recycling)... 

EPDM in [ELASTOMERS, SYNTHETIC - ETHYLENE-PROPYLENE-DIENE RUBBER] (Vol 8) -as fuel resource [FUEL RESOURCES] (Vol 12)... 

Biologically degradable rubbers can be produced from relatively cheap renewable resources such as vegetable oils and fatty acids. Due to the abundance in fatty acid compositions, many different biorubbers can be manufactured, having their own specific properties. Based on these types of rubber, several commercially interesting applications, e.g. consumables, are now being developed. 

Amari, T., Themelis, N. J. Wernick, I, K. 1999. Resource recovery from used rubber tires. Resources Policy, 25, 179-188. 

Storm water runoff from cities and villages presents another problem. This runoff contains salts from road deicing, street refuse, animal waste, food litter, residue from atmospheric deposition of sulfuric and nitric acid, metals, asbestos from automobile brakes, rubber from tires, hydrocarbons from motor vehicle exhaust condensates, oil and grease, soil and inorganic nutrients from construction sites, and a variety of other chemicals. Research shows a heavy impact of urban nonpoint pollution on freshwater quality (World Resources Institute, 1988). 

In the 1930s, more than 90 percent of the natural rubber used in the United States came from Malaysia. In the days after Pearl Harbor was attacked in December 1941 and the United States entered World War II, however, Japan captured Malaysia. As a result, the United States—the land with plenty of everything, except rubber—faced its first natural resource crisis. The military implications were devastating because without rubber for tires, military airplanes and jeeps were useless. Petroleum-based synthetic rubber had been developed in 1930 by DuPont chemist Wallace Carothers but was not widely used because it was much more expensive than natural rubber. With Malaysian rubber impossible to get and a war on, however, cost was no longer an issue. Synthetic rubber factories were constructed across the nation, and within a few years, the annual production of synthetic rubber rose from 2000 tons to about 800,000 tons. 

The suppliers of rubbers and other raw materials have been releasing technical brochures and bulletins pertaining to the suitability of various rubbers and the rubber chemicals of various kinds and various application details based on their laboratory test data and field trials. These publications are extremely useful resources for understanding rubber technology and its diversified facets. For this reason the addresses of a few references of technical literature considered as valuable sources of information are given in the appendix. 

Tires should be utilized to minimize environmental impact and maximize conservation of natural resources. This means reuse or retreading first, followed by reuse of the rubber to make rubber products or paving, and then combustion and disposal. At present, the preferred uses do not accommodate all the tires, and disposal must be utilized to a large degree. 

States and communities can work together to address tire problems. They can pool resources so that studies of the use of rubber in pavements, and studies of other uses of rubber from tires, could be performed on a larger scale leading to more useful results. 

The value of finished plastics products shipped by U.S. polymer processors was 330 billion. Polymer processing companies are large in number and of small-to-medium size. They are specialized, have only modest financial and research resources, but are by-and-large innovative, competitive, entrepreneurial, and seemingly in constant forward motion, which is characteristic of the first period of development of the rubber and plastics industry. 

Starch has been considered an attractive raw material for polymer applications for almost 200 years. Kirchoff s discovery in 1811 that treatment of starch with an acid yields a sweet substance was an unexpected result of the search for a low-cost substitute for natural rubber.1 Considerable research in the development of starch-based polymer materials has been stimulated by the facts that starch is produced from wide variety of sources, is an annually renewable resource and is inherently biodegradable. 

The period from World War I to the end of World War II saw the introduction of a number of polymers with useful properties that began to change our lives forever. Some materials, such as nylon, replaced more expensive natural fibers such as silk. Polymers such as synthetic rubber enabled countries separated from traditional natural resources to continue to wage war or to defend themselves. And still other polymers (e.g., polyethylene and polytetrafluoroethylene) enabled the development of entirely new technologies and industries (e.g., radar and telecommunications). 

In the First World War the very air had become a resource for explosives, as nitrogen was snatched from the atmosphere and processed. In that war nature had failed the German war effort, and science had been forced to substitute itself. Without rubber there could be no tyres, no electrical insulation, no balloon fabrics, no hoses, no engine packing, all necessary for industrial,... 

German resourcefulness in invention and in producing ersatz -substitutes for materials from sugar to paper, from rubber to coffee, which are in short supply owing to the War - is fully dealt with by the... 

The miscellaneous materials committees include paint, paper, packaging, rubber textiles, and plastics. The miscellaneous subjects committees include emission spectroscopy, fire standards, appearance of materials, microscopy, and resource recovery. The materials for specific applications committees include electronics, tires, consumer products, and food-service equipment. The corrosion, deterioration, and degradation of materials committees include corrosion of metals, erosion and wear, and durability of nonmetallic materials. 

Polymeric materials are today part and parcel of our everyday life. They are used in nearly every branch of industry and are responsible for rapid progress made in many of them. In view of the fact that raw materials and traditional energy resources will be soon depleted, the production of synthetic polymeric materials becomes particularly important as a way to the rational utilization of both. Today, synthetic polymeric materials are used not only as highly effective substituents for expensive and/or not readily available materials such as steel and nonferrous metals, wood and cotton, natural rubber, etc., but also as quite original materials possessing a unique set of valuable properties. 

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