The University of Arizona and tire maker Bridgestone will lead a five-year, $70 million mission to turn the desert shrub guayule into a domestic source of natural rubber.
Henry Brean Southern Arizona could soon be the place where the rubber meets the road, thanks to a new collaboration between the University of Arizona and Bridgestone Americas Inc.
The perennial plant — native to the Chihuahuan Desert of northern Mexico, southern New Mexico and southwest Texas — can be grown with a fraction of the water needed for hay or cotton, and it can be harvested every two years without the need to till the soil and replant. That means less erosion and more carbon being stored in the ground instead of floating free in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide.
Single sourceRight now, the world gets virtually all of its natural rubber from a single source: the tropical para rubber tree. Roughly 93% of that rubber is produced in Southeast Asia, leaving the global supply vulnerable to everything from crop failures to political instability. Listen now and subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | RSS Feed | Omny Studio Bridgestone already operates a 280-acre guayule farm in Eloy and a pilot processing plant in Mesa.
Rubber and glueThough its primary application is tires, the scruffy-looking bush can also be used in approximately 40,000 other products, including a hypoallergenic latex that’s perfect for medical gloves and devices. The grant for guayule is part of a much larger effort by the Biden administration to spur sustainability in agriculture across the country. The USDA initially made about $1 billion available for projects like these, but the agency was quickly overrun with more than 1,000 proposals seeking a combined $20 billion. The grant program has since been expanded to $3 billion, enough to seed more than 140 projects nationwide, Bonnie said.
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