The process may seem at first to be decidedly old world, but as a week at Michelin's rubber plantation and research centre in the wilds of Brazil showed, there is a huge amount of advanced research that goes into the main material of those black donuts - years and sometimes decades before the rubber gets delivered to the tire plant.
And that research is not restricted to increasing the amount of actual rubber produced, but also to the enhancement of the science world's understanding of the rain forest where rubber trees live, and social development aspects of the rubber tree plantations as well.
For example, Michelin's Brazilian facility has a laboratory in which scientists study a uniquely South American rubber tree "cancer," commonly called the South American Leaf Blight, which is greatly feared in the rest of the rubber producing world for the way the fungus eats up rubber tree leaves, eventually killing the tree and potentially putting the entire rubber industry at great risk.
There's also a 3,000-hectare (11.6 square miles) Atlantic rain forest reserve that Michelin has opened up to study for scientists from the world over that promises new discoveries of plant life and even small mammals, as well as its own local ecological research efforts. The plantation is also organizing some leading-edge social development efforts to bring low-cost housing and infrastructure to its workers.
It's all part of an ongoing research program that Michelin calls its Ouro Verde Bahia co-operative, which literally means "green gold" in Portuguese, and refers to Brazil's Bahia province where the site is located, about 200 km south of the city of Salvador on the Atlantic coast, in one of the poorest parts of Brazil. The project started in 2004 and is yielding improvements for all the co-op's participants, including local workers whose average annual earnings of US$3,500 a year are by far the highest in the region, as they rise along with the number of plants and other crops produced.
"In this region, there were so many dead trees caused by this disease (Leaf Blight), it led Michelin to question whether the plantation was sustainable," said Gerard Bockiau, the director of Michelin's two Brazilian plantations. "But selling it wouldn't guarantee the preservation of this part of the rain forest, and simply wouldn't be the Édouard Michelin way," citing the former Michelin co-chairman who died in 2006 at 42 in a boating accident, but whose memory remains as a social and environmental visionary in a very conservative industry.
First, though, Bockiau and his team brought our small group of North American writers up to speed on the basics of the global rubber and tire business. Although there are significant markets for rubber with boots, latex gloves and contraceptives, fully three quarters of the rubber market goes to tires. About 92 per cent of the world's rubber comes from southern Asia, from countries like Thailand, Malaysia, China and India.
Despite the largest concentration of rainforests on earth, Brazil produces only 1.3 per cent of the world's rubber, because of the aforementioned fungus, officially called microcyclus ulei. The disease is predominant in the Amazon and Atlantic rainforests of Brazil, and has been reported as far north as Mexico.
The great fear, for Michelin and for the rubber and tire industry as a whole, is that this fungus will spread to hevea (rubber) trees in Asia, where the vast majority of the world's rubber originates.
"If it passes to Asia and Africa, it would be an ecological and economic disaster, affecting three million jobs," said Dominique Garcia, a researcher with the global agricultural consulting group CIRAD (Center for International Cooperation in Agronomic Research for Development), based in Montpellier, France. "With the globalization of the transportation industry, it's only a matter of time that this fungus passes to other parts of the world."
Thanks to Canada's colder climate, though, neither the microcyclus fungus nor the rubber trees it thrives on grow here. Even in mid-winter in Brazil, which is mid-July in the southern hemisphere, temperatures very rarely dip below 20 degrees Celsius, which is why so many of the multi-coloured shacks that line the favelas outside the plantation have permanently open "windows," which are usually more like holes built into the makeshift walls, since there's never any glass and one rarely sees shutters on these openings.
Living on the plantation is a relative oasis amongst this poverty for the 3,500 workers that reside here, as the co-operative effort between Michelin, local governments and has set up a school, a medical clinic, and a mobile dentist's office in the area, none of which existed prior to Michelin's purchase of the plantation from Firestone in 1984.
"This village had no water systems or electricity, no phone service," said Bockiau. "In three years, we'll have offered 264 excellent quality low-cost ($7,000) houses, a daycare centre, a shopping mall, and recreation facilities. Even mobile phone companies are now covering this area."
While the $292 monthly income (all figures U.S.) that most of the 'tappers' receive may sound paltry, it's considerably higher than Brazil's minimum wage rate of $133 a month, or $1,600 per year. Neither figure would be enough to live in fashionable Rio or Sao Paulo, but with incomes growing through the planting of secondary crops such as cocoa that grow quicker than the seven-year start-up cycle of rubber trees, workers are literally harvesting the rewards of their productivity growth.
Research into fighting the leaf blight has been going on for 15 years at the research centre, with over 3,000 evaluations of new mixes of native and resistant tree seedlings every year, taking the most promising of these to grow a new type of rubber tree, which takes a full 20 years with these new hybrids. But the research is key to keep its Brazilian operations viable, since right now, even with advanced agronomic techniques, the plantation still produces half as much rubber per hectare as its best Asian and African counterparts. The research will become even more crucial, should the fungus reach southern Asia in particular.
"One tree here makes about five kilograms of rubber per year," said Bockiau, "or about the rubber needed for one tire on a small car." If you think about that, then consider the number of small and large vehicles packed into major urban centres, plus all the large tires needed by the trucks pulling semi-trailers across North America, it's amazing to contemplate the sheer number of trees - and research - needed to keep up with increasing global demand. Michelin is using its Ouro Verde project as a template for sustainable development in other parts of the developing world as well, and judging from the early positive returns so far in Brazil, will continue to do so.
"The Portuguese came here looking for gold (in 1500), but what they found was green gold," said Bockiau. "What we hope to do is preserve the forest for future generations."
