Great article. Was able to read using Reader Mode/View.
I had no idea:
During World War II, Japan cut the West from the global rubber supply and the United States lacked enough material to produce the plane tires, gas masks, life rafts and soldier boots required for the war. The U.S. lost access to more than 95 percent of the world’s rubber by February 1942 and launched the Emergency Rubber Project that same year — a $37 million guayule investment that some historians have touted as the Manhattan Project of the plant sciences world.
The project united chemists, foresters and engineers to cultivate 32,000 acres of guayule on American soil. Coordinators also received help from Japanese American scientists incarcerated in a U.S. prison camp, who developed ways to increase the rubber content of guayule crops but lacked enough support to pursue the research, according to historian Mark R. Finlay, who extensively studied the American rubber industry.
And this....
Sustainability efforts are trickling into other parts of the U.S. tire market. In May, lawmakers introduced a bipartisan bill to create tax incentives for tire retreading, an industry that has dwindled since its peak during the 1960s. During the retreading process, manufacturers replace the worn tread — the part of a tire that comes into contact with the road — to save costs and extend the tire’s life.
The congressional initiative would provide a tax credit of up to $30 per tire each time a commercial trucking fleet purchases retreaded tires. The bill has garnered bipartisan and industry support, with prominent tire manufacturers commending it for helping U.S. manufacturers compete with overseas competition.
“It’s simple: cars and trucks driving on American roads should have American tires, made and retreaded by American workers,” Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), the bill’s Senate sponsor, said in a written statement to The Washington Post.
Retreading is the largest remanufacturing sector in the United States and supports more than 50,000 jobs, according to the U.S. Tire Manufacturers Association, an industry trade group. But a massive spike in imports of low-cost tires from overseas has decimated the industry. The number of tire retreading facilities in the country has declined from more than 3,000 in the early 1980s to about 500 in 2023. Foreign-made tires are less likely to be retreaded because of their design and construction, according to the association, so increasing the number of high-quality, domestic tires in the U.S. market — including those made with guayule — could reduce reliance on overseas alternatives and boost the retreading industry.
