All it took was a change to the long-accepted, high-intensity vulcanization process to develop a material that's 10 times tougher than regular natural rubber.

Billions of tires are discarded globally every year, and this is identified as one of the major causes of serious ...

"Natural rubber compounds are extremely flexible, a good form of electrical insulators, and are resistant to many corrosive substances," said Bonggeun Kim, ESG team manager at Hankook Tire & ...

The chemical structure of the elastomers provides them with an inherent hardness that can be altered. The modified hardness is then measured in terms of of durometer (duro) on a Shore scale. Shore A ...

Producing natural rubber is also laborious: After harvesting the tree, latex is collected, processed, refined and coagulated. Rubber is then teased out of the latex.

Natural rubber is widely considered a more eco-friendly and better product than synthetic rubber, but it still presents some issues. Natural rubber contributes to deforestation, biodiversity loss ...