Southern Arizona could soon be the place where the rubber meets the road, thanks to a new collaboration between the University of Arizona and Bridgestone Americas Inc.
The university and the tire company are teaming up on a five-year, $70 million effort to scale up production of natural rubber from a hardy desert shrub called guayule.
Officials announced the grant-funded initiative Monday at the UA’s Controlled Environment Agriculture Center on Roger Road east of North Campbell Avenue.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture is supplying $35 million, and Bridgestone is providing the rest. The money will mostly be used to help farmers transition to growing guayule (pronounced why-YOU-lee) instead of less sustainable, more water-intensive crops such as alfalfa, cotton and wheat.
The perennial plant — native to the Chihuahuan Desert of northern Mexico, southern New Mexico and southwest Texas — can be grown with a fraction of the water needed for hay or cotton, and it can be harvested every two years without the need to till the soil and replant. That means less erosion and more carbon being stored in the ground instead of floating free in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide.
Once it’s established, guayule doesn’t require pesticides. Natural resins inside the mature plants repel insects on their own.
And since it’s a desert plant, it can survive interruptions in its water supply caused by drought, irrigation equipment failure or mandatory reductions like those many farmers are facing from the Central Arizona Project and elsewhere on the Colorado River system.
The University of Arizona is partnering with the U.S. Department of Agriculture and tire maker Bridgestone on a five-year, $70 million mission to develop a new, natural source of rubber from guayule, a desert plant. A strip of guayule is growing at the UA Controlled Environment Agriculture Center.
“We want to use less water, install irrigation systems to avoid flood irrigation, use less fertilizer and educate the growers,” said project lead Kim Ogden, who also heads up the UA’s Department of Chemical and Environmental Engineering. “If you’re looking at a big-system, life-cycle assessment, this is going to cut down on greenhouse gases.”
Single source
Right now, the world gets virtually all of its natural rubber from a single source: the tropical para rubber tree. Roughly 93% of that rubber is produced in Southeast Asia, leaving the global supply vulnerable to everything from crop failures to political instability.
Building up a domestic supply of the material is crucial, said David Dierig, section manager for agricultural operations at Bridgestone.
“We can’t do without it,” he said. “The whole economy of the U.S. runs on natural rubber.”
Smaller vehicle tires are largely made from petroleum-based synthetics, but the large tires used on tractor-trailers, jetliners and industrial farm equipment are almost entirely made from the more resilient stuff produced in nature, Dierig said. Without it, airplanes can’t land and trucks can’t deliver goods across the country.
Bridgestone has been working with guayule in Arizona since 2012 and has invested about $100 million so far in developing the plant as a domestic source of natural rubber.
Last year, the company began to expand that effort from a research-and-development project into a real business venture, Dierig said.
Bridgestone already operates a 280-acre guayule farm in Eloy and a pilot processing plant in Mesa.
Company officials plan to break ground next year on an industrial-scale processing facility they want to have ready in time to handle the roughly 25,000 acres worth of guayule Arizona farmers could be growing under contracts with Bridgestone by 2028.
“We have the ability and the capability to produce it on a large scale,” said Dierig, who received his Ph.D. in genetics from the UA. “Eventually, we hope to have plantings of around 100,000 acres, spread out across 15 or 20 facilities across the Southwest.”
But domestic production is never likely to replace the natural rubber supply from overseas. At most, Dierig said, guayule can probably satisfy about 20% of Bridgestone’s overall demand for the natural stuff.
Rubber and glue
Though its primary application is tires, the scruffy-looking bush can also be used in approximately 40,000 other products, including a hypoallergenic latex that’s perfect for medical gloves and devices.
The plant has a rubber content of just 5%, so to make large-scale cultivation economically viable, Ogden and company have been working to find uses for the rest of the plant. Guayule resin, for example, can be used to make natural adhesives and bug repellents.
The rest of the plant’s woody biomass can be added to particle board or turned into biofuel to generate heat and electricity.
Robert Bonnie, USDA undersecretary for farm production and conservation, said guayule is a great example of what he called “climate-smart agriculture”: A sustainable product “that can reduce greenhouse gas emissions even while we create economic opportunities for communities in the Southwest.”
The grant for guayule is part of a much larger effort by the Biden administration to spur sustainability in agriculture across the country. The USDA initially made about $1 billion available for projects like these, but the agency was quickly overrun with more than 1,000 proposals seeking a combined $20 billion. The grant program has since been expanded to $3 billion, enough to seed more than 140 projects nationwide, Bonnie said.
Tucson Mayor Regina Romero, who was on hand for Monday’s announcement, called the guayule project “an investment in the Sonoran Desert” that will help improve both the region’s sustainability and its economy by producing “green jobs.”
Additional participants in the project include regional growers, the Colorado River Indian Tribes, Colorado State University and OpenET, a public-private partnership that provides satellite-based data to improve water management.
“This is an effort of partnership,” said Betsy Cantwell, senior vice president for research and innovation at the university. “It doesn’t happen without that.”
Teaming up with a company like Bridgestone is also key, said Dennis Ray, a retired UA professor and geneticist who is considered one of the world’s leading experts in guayule after roughly 40 years of studying the plant.
“Over-enthusiastic researchers can’t push a product,” Ray said. “Industry has to pull it.”
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