Continental builds natural rubber research facility
Natural rubber is still essential today for truck tires and winter tires for passenger cars. Therefore, it should be further researched how this can be extracted from a dandelion root.
AnklamThe white plant milk in the dandelion sticks: it contains rubber. The tire manufacturer Continental wants to take advantage of this and future Rubber for car tires from dandelion roots instead of exclusively from tropical rubber trees win. There were attempts already in the 1930s among others in the Soviet Union as well as during and after the Second World War.
But it lacked suitable plants and a reasonable extraction technique, as Professor Dirk Prüfer of the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster says. He is the head of a team that worked with the tire manufacturer to find ways to extract the rubber from dandelion roots.
On Thursday wants Continental In Mecklenburg-Vorpommern Anklam open a research and testing laboratory for rubber production. Natural rubber is still essential today for truck tires and winter tires for passenger cars.
Scientists from the University of Münster and the Fraunhofer Institute for Molecular Biology and Applied Ecology IME, the Julius Kühn Institute Quedlinburg and Continental as well as plant breeders have taken part in the project worked for years, The raw material is Russian dandelion, which is smaller but has a much higher rubber content than the native plant, as Prüfer explains.
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The root consists of about 15 percent of rubber. “The first experiments showed that the rubber is as good as the rubber tree,” says the scientist. In the meantime, the dandelion has been optimized in terms of breeding so that the content of ingredients is stable.
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When choosing the location for the experimental laboratory, the “Taraxagum Lab” after the Latin name Taraxacum for dandelions, coincidence helped with. Prüfer presented the idea 2013 in Anklam on biotechnology days and met with interest in the city.
Everything else resulted: suitable soils and large areas in the area, farmers who were willing to grow the “weeds”, as well as experience in the city with the processing of roots – of sugar beet. In Anklam produces the only sugar factory in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania.
In 2017, farmers from four companies around nearby Ducherow planted dandelions for the first time on a large scale, covering approximately 30 hectares. At the beginning of the week, Ducherower Agrar GmbH harvested its 12-hectare area, as one employee says. The leaf green remains in the field, the roots are brought to Anklam.
There is no concern among the population that the dandelion is spreading everywhere in the region. The Russian dandelion does not poach, as Prüfer assures. The aim is to have larger roots and a yield of one ton of rubber per hectare. That would correspond to the yield on rubber plantations, compares Prüfer. The roots are harvested provisionally with a carrot harvester. “But a special harvester has to be built,” he says.
In the laboratory, the roots are crushed in mills with water, whereby the rubber is washed out without the need for toxic solvents. The residues can go into the biogas plant or be processed into bioethanol. This, too, according to Prüfer, is similar to sugar beet processing.