Are Car Tyres made from natural rubber?

How Is The Rubber For Car Tyres Made?

Have you ever wondered how rubber is made? We took a look in to the production of rubber. There are two types of rubber; synthetic and natural rubber. Natural rubber is made from rubber trees and they say money does not grow on trees! Huge plantations of these rubber trees are grown across many acres of land. The trees are cut early in the morning and the slits in the trees drip latex. This liquid latex is collected in buckets, which have to be emptied out every two to three hours. The workers then have to ensure that the latex is transported to the factory as quickly as possible. Any delays can mean that the latex itself will coagulate and this means that it is then quite simply useless. Although you will not find natural rubber in things like car tyres you will find natural rubber used to produce things such as elastic bands. Rubber as a product is not only very stretchy and bouncy, it is also very waterproof too. Some large jumbo jets are fitted with natural rubber tyres for the landing gear.

Many products today are made from synthetic rubbers. Synthetic rubber however uses the planets resources. Produced from fossil fuels such as coal, petroleum, acetylene and natural gas, although the manufacturing process of heating the rubber up to mould the rubber is similar. The man-made rubber once it is made forms clumps of rubber, this is then dried out and rolled into large sheets. These sheets can then be loaded on to lorries for transportation. The rubber sheets are then moved on to the factory, where production of the final item takes place. This could be anything from car tyres to children's toys.

Moulding rubber can be carried out in several ways. Extrusion is one of the most common methods used to mould rubber. Rubber is heated and the forced at high pressure through a small hole this method can produce long strands of rubber. Another method of moulding rubber is compression moulding and this again is done under heat and pressure, however this time the rubber is heated in a mould. The rubber is then left to cool in the mould and the rubber creates a replica of the mould. The final way of which rubber can be moulded is a method of injection moulding. This is achieved by heating rubber again which is then injected in to a mould and cooled to create the final product. So thats it! Car tyres are made from synthetic rubber...