Agriculture and Environment: Rubber

Introduction

Rubber trees are long-lived. Because of the longevity of the trees and because synthetic substitutes have been developed for many of the products, expansion of rubber plantations has not been significant globally.

The one notable exception is China, where natural habitat in the more tropical, southern part of the country was being cleared until very recently in order to establish rubber plantations.

Failed experimental plantations in Amazon
There have also been a number of quite large failed experiments to establish rubber plantations in the Amazon basin, but all of these efforts succumbed to disease after the native forests were destroyed.

Effluents from rubber production
The ongoing impacts of rubber production, then, are mostly linked to processing. Converting the liquid sap that is collected directly from the tree to latex produces considerable amounts of effluent. Some of the chemicals in the effluent are highly toxic.

In addition, the conversion of sap to solid latex requires a fair amount of energy (either fuelwood or electricity) to separate it from the water after coagulation.

Finally, the vulcanisation of latex into rubber also releases effluents that are highly toxic in the environment. In many countries, the emission of effluents from rubber processing and vulcanising plants is not well regulated.