Meyer: NR work more vital than moon travel

Katrina Cornish has spent more than three decades studying natural rubber and working to develop a viable alternative NR that can be grown domestically in the U.S.

After starting with the U.S. Department of Agriculture and working at Yulex Corp., she has been a research scholar at Ohio State University since mid-2010. Cornish also is chief science and technology officer at EnergyEne Inc., which produces latex natural rubber from guayule, the desert shrub that, along with the TKS dandelion, is one of the brightest hopes to produce alternative natural rubber in the coming years.

After all those years of R&D, Cornish was blunt about her hopes of seeing her life's work blossom as it should.

"If we can put a man on the moon, we can have a domestic rubber crop," she said in her presentation at the International Tire Exhibition & Conference.

Sounds simple, but work on guayule has gone on for well over a century. In the early 1900s, John D. Rockefeller was among a group of investors who anted up $30 million to start a guayule firm to extract rubber from wild guayule that was growing near the U.S.-Mexican border. That was doomed by the Mexican revolution and poor farming methods.

While in the U.S. Army in 1930, Dwight Eisenhower recommended guayule be grown for emergency use, but NR from Southeast Asia was cheap and widely available at the time. Guayule had a brief renaissance during World War II, when the Emergency Rubber Project backed work that saw guayule rubber processing soar, only to see the efforts disappear after the war ended and synthetic rubber became readily available.

But the stars now are aligning for guayule and the TKS dandelion to step forward and reach the potential to be a viable force in the rubber industry in the U.S. and elsewhere around the globe. With all the sustainability goals set between now and 2050, when most tire companies are aiming to produce 100-percent sustainable tires, the investment dollars are flowing at unprecedented levels into alternative NR projects.

Among other projects, Bridgestone Americas just announced a $42 million investment to bolster its efforts to commercialize guayule rubber. Continental is one of the firms backing dandelion research, and its Taraxagum project has put together a network of partners looking to industrialize the cultivation of dandelion rubber.

While making domestic natural rubber may not seem as exciting as a moon landing, given the national defense implications, it's probably a lot more important.

Meyer learned how to pronounce guayule early in his career at Rubber News. Reach him at [email protected] and follow him on Twitter @bmeyerRPN.