Goodyear, DOD researching dandelion-based natural rubber

AKRON—Sourcing domestic natural rubber has become a matter of national defense, and Goodyear is partnering with the Department of Defense, U.S. Air Force and other entities to make such U.S.-based stock a reality.

Goodyear's collaboration with DOD, the USAF Research Lab, BioMADE and Farmed Materials Inc. will help get dandelion-sourced domestic natural rubber to market more quickly.

"Global demand for natural rubber continues to grow, and it remains a key raw material for the tire industry," said Chris Helsel, senior vice president of Global Operations and chief technology officer for Goodyear. "This is a critical time to develop a domestic source of natural rubber, which may help mitigate future supply chain challenges."

The multi-year, multi-million dollar program—announced April 7—will look to develop the dandelion-sourced natural rubber, categorized as a "strategic raw material" for military vehicles, aircraft and truck tires.

Natural rubber is a key raw material in more than 40,000 products, used in mattresses, medical gloves and shoe soles, as well as tire production.

A vast majority of NR—about 90 percent—currently comes from latex produced by natural rubber trees, mostly in Southeast Asia and tropical regions.

Thus far, more than 2,500 plant types have been analyzed by Goodyear as possible sources of NR, though few species have been found to produce latex with the performance traits required to manufacture tires. It said its research has shown that taraxacum kok-saghyz, the dandelion in question known as TK, is the most promising plant.

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For its part, Cincinnati, Ohio-based Farmed Materials has conducted pilot programs for TK, yielding viable harvests at the company's vast acreage in southwestern Ohio.

"This partnership highlights how BioMADE brings together companies of different sizes to solve critical problems," said Melanie Tomczak, chief technology officer at BioMADE. "We're excited about this project, which holds a lot of promise for domestic rubber production and shows how bio-industrial manufacturing can help secure the domestic supply chain."

Dandelions can be grown in temperate rather than tropical climates and harvested in about six months, much more quickly than natural rubber trees, which take about seven years to produce the necessary latex required for natural rubber.

The program is set to begin in spring 2022 at Farmed Materials' site. Farmed Materials was founded in 2016. The NR produced will be used to make military aircraft tires that will be built and tested by Goodyear in conjunction with the U.S. Air Force's AFRL at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio.

Goodyear and the DOD are actually late-comers to viewing the Russian dandelion as a potential source of latex.

Continental A.G. has been evaluating its use for nearly a decade, teaming up in 2013 with Fraunhofer Institute for Molecular Biology and Applied Ecology in Aachen, Germany, in a joint venture to produce industrial rubber made from dandelions.

That initial dive into researching the use of dandelion-derived latex for rubber led three years later to Conti’s decision to build a research facility in Anklam, Germany, dedicated to the endeavor, budgeting $39 million through 2021 to fund it.

That project, operating under the umbrellas of Conti’s “Taraxagum” moniker, focuses on industrializing the cultivation and processing of the material.  Conti also has overseen the planting of 1,976 acres of the plant in northern Germany.

Last year it unveiled a concept passenger tire, the GreenConcept, made with a range of renewable materials, including dandelion-latex-based natural rubber.

Conti’s not alone, however.

India’s Apollo Tyres Ltd. and Balkrishna Industries Ltd., China’s Linglong Group Co. Ltd.
Japan’s Sumitomo Rubber Industries Ltd. and farm tire maker Mitas A.S. all have looked at or are involved in research projects to develop rubber from dandelion latex.

In addition, Cooper Tire & Rubber looked at TKS-derived rubber from 2012-17 under a DOD grant.

Meanwhile, Bridgestone Americas has been studying the guayule plant, a drought-resistant desert shrub that Bridgestone has been researching since 2012 as a suitable and more sustainable domestic source of natural rubber.

The tire maker recently received a grant from the Department of Energy to further its research into guayule, specifically in Central Arizona where Bridgestone works with farmers to grow the shrub. The amount of Bridgestone's grant was not disclosed.

Bridgestone said the grant from the U.S. DOE Joint Genome Institute—one of many the company has received from various sources for its work in this area—will be funneled toward research in increasing the rubber content of the plant.

The grant will be used to "sequence and map genes of three guayule varieties" at a processing and research center in Mesa, Ariz., as well as a 281-acre farm in Eloy, Ariz.

Facilities and farms in California, New Mexico and in Italy also will serve as research sites, Bridgestone said.

The company has poured more than $100 million into this research, and produced the world's first tire from guayule-derived rubber in 2015.