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Innovations


CAN THE TIRE INDUSTRY BE SUSTAINABLE? GUAYULE FARMERS SAY YES.


(Illustration by Janet Mac for The Washington Post)


A SMALL SHRUB GROWN DURING WORLD WAR II MAKES A COMEBACK AS TIRE MANUFACTURERS
LOOK FOR DOMESTIC AND SUSTAINABLE MATERIALS.

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By Hannah Ziegler
Oct. 22, 2024 at 6:30 a.m.

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With water cuts looming in 2019, Will Thelander planted guayule on a 20-acre
patch of his 6,000-acre farm in Pinal County, Ariz. He knew the hardy green
shrub thrives in blistering heat and can survive months with little water.

His initial investment was much more than a water scarcity choice. Guayule
(pronounced why-OO-lee) could be, within the next decade, a source of rubber for
tire manufacturers in the United States.

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Investment in the crop has skyrocketed. In 2022, the Agriculture Department and
Bridgestone, the tire and rubber company, gave University of Arizona researchers
$70 million in funding to help them grow and process guayule — the first time in
the crop’s century of cultivation where government, academic and industry
professionals have united around its development. Bridgestone has also funneled
more than $100 million into guayule exploration since 2012 and now boasts its
own 281-acre guayule farm in Eloy, Ariz. IndyCar even debuted guayule-made tires
on the racetrack in 2022 and expanded the initiative to every street circuit
race this season.

These moves come at an inflection point for the global rubber supply chain.
Natural rubber cultivation, centralized in Southeast Asia, is increasingly
subject to climate change and geopolitical instability. Synthetic rubber
production has boomed in the last century and makes up 70 percent of the rubber
used in the manufacturing process today — a $31.1 billion market as of 2022,
according to the Observatory of Economic Complexity, which tracks economic data.
Natural rubber production has lagged behind, with an estimated market size of
$2.38 billion in 2022. Rubber is widely considered one of the most crucial
commodities on Earth, but the United States has never made a sustained effort to
establish a domestic natural supply — until now.




DEMAND FOR SUSTAINABILITY AFFECTS THE RUBBER TRADE

Most of the world’s natural rubber is cultivated on 35 million acres of land in
Southeast Asia and the retrieval process is grueling. Workers slice grooves into
rubber trees and peel back the bark to gather cups of latex. Once collected, the
latex becomes the rubber in tires, shoes and medical gloves. When a rubber
tree’s latex content depletes, farmers uproot and replant entire forests to
start a new harvest.

Environmentalists have decried the climate impact of rubber production. The
process is ruinous for soil health and erodes land once home to tropical
rainforests. Threats from rising sea levels, floods and droughts also weigh
heavily on rubber production in the region, increasing the chance for
disease-causing bacteria to spread across plantations whose lackluster
biodiversity makes it difficult for rubber trees to survive these threats.

Guayule grows in the field at Bridgestone's 281-acre farm in Eloy, Ariz. (David
Blakeman for The Washington Post) Guayule's rubber content hovers between 3 and
7 percent. (David Blakeman for The Washington Post)

Rising labor costs in maturing economies such as Thailand, Indonesia and Vietnam
compound the climate threat. Some farmers have abandoned their rubber
plantations in favor of more lucrative crops such as palm oil.

Unlike traditional rubber trees, guayule can be harvested with existing row-crop
equipment because it grows about 20 inches tall. Farmers harvest the crop by
cutting its stem about three inches above the ground and drying it in the field
for a few days. From there, workers haul the shrub to a bioprocessing plant to
extract its rubber.

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Immediately after farmers dry their harvest, they can start watering the
existing plant again for the next two-year growing cycle. That helps them avoid
the expensive and tedious hassle of replanting entire fields of crops after
harvest, according to Mark Newell, Bridgestone’s chief agricultural scientist.
Guayule also requires a fraction of the water and fertilizer needed to sustain
other southwestern crops such as cotton and alfalfa, Newell added.

“There’s not much weed pressure, pretty much no disease pressure, no insect
pressure,” Newell said. “From a sustainability standpoint, it makes a lot of
sense.”

Mark Newell, Bridgestone's chief agricultural scientist, said guayule is high
maintenance when first planted but quickly becomes manageable after taking root.
(David Blakeman for The Washington Post)

Industry leaders in the United States got serious about guayule investment
around 2010 when the price of natural rubber reached an all-time high after a
severe drought hit Thailand. The spike was a “holy cow moment” for the U.S.
rubber industry and highlighted its reliance on a fragile global supply chain,
said Bill Niaura, who leads Bridgestone’s guayule exploration.

Price fluctuations could become more frequent with climate change and supply
chain pressures, Niaura said. The pandemic wreaked havoc on the supply chains
that connect North America to Southeast Asia, and geopolitical tensions between
the United States and China have prolonged a return to normal.

Security concerns drive much of the U.S.’s investment in domestic natural
rubber, said Kimberly Ogden, the chemical and environmental engineering
department head at the University of Arizona and principal investigator for the
school’s $70 million guayule project. “Now it’s really a push because of the
supply chains,” Ogden said. “It’s a big deal to try to have something here in
the U.S. just for security.”




GUAYULE AND WORLD WAR II

Guayule has existed for hundreds of years, but interest in the crop often ramps
up during times of crisis, said Grisel Ponciano, a research molecular biologist
at the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service who has been working with guayule
for about 14 years.

During World War II, Japan cut the West from the global rubber supply and the
United States lacked enough material to produce the plane tires, gas masks, life
rafts and soldier boots required for the war. The U.S. lost access to more than
95 percent of the world’s rubber by February 1942 and launched the Emergency
Rubber Project that same year — a $37 million guayule investment that some
historians have touted as the Manhattan Project of the plant sciences world.

The project united chemists, foresters and engineers to cultivate 32,000 acres
of guayule on American soil. Coordinators also received help from Japanese
American scientists incarcerated in a U.S. prison camp, who developed ways to
increase the rubber content of guayule crops but lacked enough support to pursue
the research, according to historian Mark R. Finlay, who extensively studied the
American rubber industry.

A treating room for guayule seed in Salinas, Calif., in May 1942. (Library of
Congress)

But as the Emergency Rubber Project unfolded, the country also looked to develop
a synthetic rubber supply and invested at least $700 million to build it.
Synthetic rubber was easier and quicker to perfect than guayule and helped
companies keep up with rubber demand without having to rely on nature or crop
breeding. As synthetic alternatives boomed after the war, federal support for
guayule dried up. In the process, much of the guayule progress made during the
Emergency Rubber Project was destroyed.

Synthetic rubber, which is made from crude oil, is less durable and relies
heavily on fossil fuels, making it undesirable from a sustainability
perspective. It’s also not biodegradable, so synthetic tires can sit in
landfills for years and release toxic chemicals into soil and water. About 70
percent of the global rubber supply is synthetic today, compared to less than 1
percent before the war, according to the World Wildlife Fund.

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“The Emergency Rubber Project was a herculean effort, probably hindered by the
technology of the time, and that effort also really started the modern synthetic
rubber industry,” Niaura said. “We had a good start but still had a lot of work
to do.”

A key barrier to guayule’s commercialization is its rubber content, which hovers
between 3 and 7 percent. For the crop to be economically viable, experts said
its rubber output needs to double.

To do that, agronomists at Bridgestone are crossbreeding promising parent genes
found in modern guayule plants. Ponciano’s USDA lab is also trying to improve
rubber content. She’s working to make guayule grow denser to help farmers plant
more shrubs in the same amount of space. But the crop’s complex biology is
preventing its success, she said.

“It’s still wild,” Ponciano said. “Guayule doesn’t have the 10,000-year
development of wheat and rice. That history doesn’t exist. Now, we have
molecular tools that can speed up that process and make a good selection of good
plants, but we still aren’t domesticated, so it’s really strange.”

When farmers harvest guayule, they cut its stem about three inches above the
ground and dry it in the field for a few days. (David Blakeman for The
Washington Post) Abby Emperado, a senior agricultural technician at
Bridgestone’s guayule farm, has a rubber molecule tattoo. (David Blakeman for
The Washington Post)

Guayule’s lack of uniformity can make it challenging for farmers. Newell
described the shrub as a high-maintenance crop when first planted but he said it
quickly becomes manageable after taking root. The shrub isn’t as genetically
straightforward as the crops that dominate American agriculture, he said, and it
can feel like farmers are “inventing the wheel” when they grow it for the first
time.

“It’s a temperamental little baby, but as soon as it’s a toddler, it’s one of
the easiest crops you can grow,” Thelander said.




TIRE MANUFACTURERS AND INDYCAR EMBRACE GUAYULE

By 2030, Bridgestone hopes to cultivate 25,000 acres of guayule across the
Southwest using partnerships that help farmers adjust to growing the new crop.
Extension specialists at the University of Arizona have been signing up and
teaching individual farmers to grow guayule on 30 to 100 acres of their land.

Those education efforts have also reached the racetrack. If you’ve watched an
IndyCar race recently, there’s a good chance a lime green stripe on the
alternate tires has whizzed past your eye. For the last two years, guayule’s
slender, silvery-green leaves have given way to Firestone Firehawk alternate
circuit race tires.

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Cara Krstolic, the executive director for race tire engineering and
manufacturing and chief motorsports engineer at Bridgestone, has relayed lessons
learned on the track to the scientists working to put guayule tires on standard
vehicles. The biggest testament to guayule-made tires, she said, is that racers
can’t tell the difference from traditional rubber ones.

“If it can be pulled off here, then I could expect to see that in my consumer
tires,” said Mark Sibla, IndyCar’s chief of staff. Indy cars can drive as fast
as 240 mph during a qualifying run.

The final barrier to guayule’s commercial success is developing a market for its
byproducts. The shrub has a resin content between 7 and 9 percent, which makes
it a candidate for use in natural adhesives and insect repellents. After
extracting rubber, scientists could convert the plant’s residual, woody material
into biofuel or use it to make particle boards, Niaura said. Bridgestone has
ramped up its efforts to develop markets for these products, he added.




SUSTAINABILITY AND RETREADING OLD TIRES

Sustainability efforts are trickling into other parts of the U.S. tire market.
In May, lawmakers introduced a bipartisan bill to create tax incentives for tire
retreading, an industry that has dwindled since its peak during the 1960s.
During the retreading process, manufacturers replace the worn tread — the part
of a tire that comes into contact with the road — to save costs and extend the
tire’s life.

The congressional initiative would provide a tax credit of up to $30 per tire
each time a commercial trucking fleet purchases retreaded tires. The bill has
garnered bipartisan and industry support, with prominent tire manufacturers
commending it for helping U.S. manufacturers compete with overseas competition.

“It’s simple: cars and trucks driving on American roads should have American
tires, made and retreaded by American workers,” Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), the
bill’s Senate sponsor, said in a written statement to The Washington Post.

Retreading is the largest remanufacturing sector in the United States and
supports more than 50,000 jobs, according to the U.S. Tire Manufacturers
Association, an industry trade group. But a massive spike in imports of low-cost
tires from overseas has decimated the industry. The number of tire retreading
facilities in the country has declined from more than 3,000 in the early 1980s
to about 500 in 2023. Foreign-made tires are less likely to be retreaded because
of their design and construction, according to the association, so increasing
the number of high-quality, domestic tires in the U.S. market — including those
made with guayule — could reduce reliance on overseas alternatives and boost the
retreading industry.

Guayule isn’t as genetically straightforward as the crops that dominate U.S.
agriculture, so it can feel like farmers are “inventing the wheel” when they
grow it for the first time, Newell said. (David Blakeman for The Washington
Post)
A seed processor at Bridgestone's guayule farm. (David Blakeman for The
Washington Post)

Incentivizing the purchase of American-made tires will protect jobs and help
businesses grow, Rep. Darin LaHood (R-Ill.), the bill’s House co-sponsor, told
The Post. The current U.S. tire market “is being flooded with low-quality, cheap
products that threaten our manufacturers, national security, safety and
sustainability,” he said.

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Retreading tires is cheaper than buying new ones domestically, but inexpensive
foreign tires provide a cost-effective alternative that domestic manufacturers
can't match, according to Joe Burke, Goodyear’s North American commercial
business vice president. U.S.-made tires are durable enough for three to five
retread cycles, saving 90 to 100 pounds of material each time by avoiding the
need for new tire casings, Burke said. But commercial fleet managers often opt
for the least expensive tire option without thinking about the replacement
costs, he added.

“The legislation that’s out there is going to put us in a very competitive
position with the marketplace, and it’s going to open up a lot of opportunities
that otherwise may not have been there over the past five to seven years,” Burke
said.

ABOUT THIS STORY

Editing by Bronwen Latimer. Copy editing by Jamie Zega. Photo editing by Haley
Hamblin. Design, development and art direction by Audrey Valbuena. Design
editing by Betty Chavarria. Project development by Evan Bretos and Hope
Corrigan. Project editing by Marian Chia-Ming Liu.

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