Guest
Rubber is used in a ton of products in the developed and developing worlds. It forms door and window seals, it makes gaskets used in power plants, the soles of shoes, and insulates tools for working with electricity. It’s a large part of our daily lives, whether we realize that or not. Still, there is one use for rubber that almost everyone can easily think of – tires. In America, most families have at least one vehicle, likely two. That means every family has at least eight tires (ten if you include the spares) sitting in their driveway every day. The number can actually be quite a bit more than that when you add in the odd three-car household, snow tires and a utility trailer. All of those tires come from somewhere and for the most part, that somewhere is the Para rubber tree that grows in Southeast Asia. It’s where a lot of tire companies get the raw material to make their tires. I’ll bet you never thought of Goodyear as a farming company, yet that is a large part of what they and others do. As one
