Cleaner, Greener Synthetic Rubber Tires Start to Roll

Tires are made from oil. Nearly seven gallons of oil per tire, which adds up: 290 million tires are thrown away every year, meaning that tires account for about 50 million barrels of oil per year in the US alone. But what if rubber could be made from grass, or corn, or cane, or whatever biomass that happens to be lying around? If so tires would then be a carbon sink, and thus more tires would mean... drum roll... less global warming!

It's not such a crazy idea, as it turns out. It was not so long ago ago that tires were made from from the sap of rubber trees, after all. (And actually, they still are, in part.) World War II and the Japanese conquest of the rubber plantations of Asia prompted the Allies to figure out how to make synthetic rubber. The key molecule in rubber, both the synthetic and natural varieties, is called isoprene. The Allies, under pressure, figured out how to make it by "cracking" oil and tar in a refinery. So, faced with rising carbon in our atmosphere and dwindling supplies of oil in the ground, why not go the other direction? Why not extract isoprene from biomass instead of relying on a couple eons of geologic time turns it into crude? That way we could make a natural synthetic rubber.

And that's exactly what the industrial biotech firm Genencor has managed to do. After only two years in the lab, they're ready with a process that creates Isoprene from biomass, and they're calling it BioIsoprene.

Genecor's research partner, Goodyear, has already made a few low-carbon BioIsoprene-based tires. What's more, the manufacturing process scales. According to Genecor, the total yearly BioIsoprene market could reach $1.2 billion as soon as 2012.

Just makes you want to get out there and do donuts, doesn't it?

photo: Eric Castro