Speaking from the Chair
BY G. E. BEHARRELL
Chairman of the International Synthetic Rubber Co. Ltd.
OUR war-time experiences sharply underlined the vital importance of rubber in our every- day activities, from the tyres which keep our transport moving to the thousand and one other rubber products essential to our modern way of life. World demand for rubber has grown rapidly from around 50,000 tons at the beginning of the century to one million tons by 1940 and three million tons today. During the last seven years it has outgrown the capacity of the natural rubber- producing industry, and since it takes about seven years for a rubber tree to reach maturity, expan- sion of output of natural rubber is necessarily a slow process. The deficit, which now exceeds one million tons per year, has been met by synthetic rubber largely from the plants in the US and Canada which came into existence as a result of the war emergency. The US plants were sold by the US Government to private industry in 1955 and since then their capacity has been progres- sively expanded and demand stimulated by the cheapness and stability of price of the synthetic product.
Attempts to produce a synthetic rubber go back into the nineteenth century, but commercial pro- duction began in the prewar period with the oil- resistant types—Neoprene and the so-called 'nitrite' rubbers. Since the war the general-purpose material, made from butadiene and styrene, usually called GR-S, has been increasingly used as a replacement for natural rubber, especially the low-temperature polymerised type called 'cold rubber,' which has some attractions as a tyre tread material. The tough material which results from increasing the proportion of styrene has been extensively used as a shoe-soling material. Another polymer called Butyl has been found especially suitable for inner tubes owing to its low permeability. This material has lost ground since the advent of the tubeless tyre, but its properties continue to find application in numerous other fields.
Countries outside the US have made growing use of synthetic rubber in recent years, and when national demand becomes large enough plans for indigenous production naturally emerge. Plants to produce GR-S type rubbers are now being erected in Britain, Germany and Italy, whilst plans are under discussion for its production in Holland, Japan, India, Brazil, Spain, South Africa and Australia. In France a Butyl plant is being constructed and Neoprene plants are to be built in Northern Ireland and Germany.
Interest in synthetic rubber in the UK goes back before 1900 when Tilden first prepared
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