WOOSTER, Ohio -- Within a decade, you could be driving on tires made from dandelions.

Researchers at the

are working with industry giants including Bridgestone Corp. and Ford Motor Co. to harvest natural rubber from a relative of those plants home gardeners love to hate.

"A weed is only a plant growing where you didn't want it," said Katrina Cornish, an Ohio Research Scholar at OARDC. "If it's growing where you want it, it becomes a beautiful flower."

Cornish is part of a team of researchers who began breeding and cultivating Russian dandelions about six years ago. The plants in Wooster look similar to the backyard variety dandelion, with broad leafy bases and yellow flowers, but they are not the same.

The Russian species -- known scientifically as Taraxacum kok-saghyz, or TKS -- have long, thick roots that have the right mix of rubber polymers, proteins and fatty acids in them that contain a natural latex. Break open a TKS root, roll the sticky, milky white cream that oozes out around in your palm, let it dry and it will bounce like a ball.

Cornish calls it Buckeye Gold.

Making a commercial crop





The Russians first discovered the potential for harvesting rubber from the dandelions in the 1920s. When natural rubber was in limited supply during World War II, due to demand for airplane and truck tires and restricted imports, the U.S. began exploring the dandelions as an alternative source. That research was abandoned after the war.

Today, tires are made from a combination of synthetic rubber derived from petroleum and natural rubber harvested from trees. Natural rubber provides greater resistance than synthetic and is in high demand as a raw material in tires and a slew of other products. But the supply of natural rubber is largely dependent on small rubber tree farms in Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia, which is problematic.

"It has a lot of volatility with regard to price and even supply at times," said Greg Bowman, manager of the advanced technology group at Findlay-based Cooper Tire & Rubber Co. "There were times in 2008 where there was a shortage."

Natural rubber prices jumped in 2008 and in 2011 when supplies waned, according to trade publications. Bryan Kinnamon, director of Ohio State's industry liaison office, which does commercialization for OARDC, said natural rubber prices were about 50 cents a pound in 2003 but have "oscillated up and down since."

Prices peaked in February 2011 at $3 a pound and hover at about $1.50 a pound now, Kinnamon said.

"Every year since 2004 there has been a shortage," Kinnamon said.

Related

With higher prices over the past decade, and shortages on the horizon, tire conferences like

this week, feature sessions on alternative sources of natural rubber, said Dave Zielasko, publisher of Rubber & Plastic News and head organizer of the conference.

The bi-annaul conference, which has more than 3,000 attendees from 20 countries, included sessions on alternative natural rubber sources.

"This is a big issue with tire manufacturers," Zielasko said.

Cooper Tire's Bowman said, "It's this price volatility that really affects the company's profitability." Cooper Tire was one of the earliest collaborators on Ohio State's Russian dandelion project.

Tire and automobile companies have set up laboratories and research teams to find domestic, natural rubber sources. So far, Russian dandelion and a Southwest desert shrub called Guayule are showing the most promise.

"The Russian dandelion makes a rubber that . . . is very similar to the tire rubber," Cornish said. "And it can be grown here."

In 2008, a $3 million Third Frontier grant from the state of Ohio was awarded to researchers at OARDC for the Russian dandelion project. The scientists there collaborate and share research with industry leaders, as well as scientists at University of Akron and Oregon State.

Over the past six years, the researchers have bred and cultivated the dandelions on a small plot in Wooster. They are trying to cultivate a plate that will produce a consistent and large amount of latex.

The development of natural rubber sources like Russian dandelions as a rubber crop can not come fast enough for Dr. Hiroshi Mouri, president of Bridgetone Americas Research and Technology Center in Akron.

"There is a chance that the natural rubber in Southeast Asia may become extinct," Mouri said, adding that leaf blight killed the crops in the plant's native Brazil.

"We need to be prepared for a second source," Mouri said.

In May, Bridgestone announced that it had "promising results indicating that the Russian dandelion can become a commercially viable, renewable source of high-quality, tire-grade rubber."

The news, though, came on the heels of Bridgestone's announcement in March that it was establishing a pilot farm and constructing a rubber process research center in the Southwestern United States to focus on the development of Guayule (pronounced y-u-lee) plant rubber.

Angela Harris, a biomaterials research engineer who is leading Ford Motor Co.'s efforts to develop bio-based plastics for car parts such as bumpers, said the auto manufacturer is tracking the development of both Russian dandelion and Guayule.

"It's going to be interesting over the next few years," Harris said.

How efficient each crop is in yields, in other words how much rubber can be produced on an acre, will be a "big factor in which of these crops wins," she said.

Growing gold

Standing in a temperature controlled greenhouse at the Wooster research campus, Matt Kleinhenz looks at rows of squat green plants dotted with a few yellow flowers.

"These are what we call our parents," Kleinhenz said.

Each plant looks oddly familiar, but different. Some have big leaves, others have small. Some of the leaves have wavy edges and others are smooth.

The pots are marked with a "U" or "K" to denote where they're from -- each is a specimen that can be traced back to the Republics of Uzbekistan or Kazakhstan.

The scientists in Wooster, with Kleinhenz at the lead, have cultivated these plants for the past six years from seeds gathered from the harsh, cold climates of the former Soviet republics. They sorted and cleaned 75,000 seeds and found that about only 2 percent were the precious Russian dandelion seeds, Kleinhenz said.

They used those original seeds to breed new plants.

"In spring 2012, we produced 13 million seeds," Kleinheinz said. "Now, we're getting the base. . . we're establishing the foundation." That, hopefully, will be enough to find the perfect specimen.

As a crop, the rubber-producing dandelions would be planted in the spring, spend the winter in the ground and then be harvested the following spring.

"So far, we are seeing that there's considerably more rubber in the spring than in the fall," Cornish said.

Scientists have produced plants with as much as 18.6 percent rubber when dried, or on what is called a dry weight basis. But for crop purposes, OARDC researchers believe they can average about 10 percent rubber on a dry weight basis, which means they can produce 250 passenger-truck tires from each acre of planting.

Still, they are working to increase that ratio, Cornish said. It's still relatively early in the research and she said they don't yet know the maximum amount of rubber a plant can produce on a consistent basis.

"Will we top out at 1 ton or will we top out at 2 tons? Or will we only get half a ton?" Cornish said.

Cornish's colleague Kleinhenz warns that right now, the scientists are still trying to find the perfect specimen to replicate in large-scale fields.

While cultivating the perfect dandelion, the researchers are also creating fertilizer and weed killers for the crop.

Once they have fine-tuned the plant and method of growing it, farmers from Oregon to New York and up into Canada could be planting crops of Russian dandelions for rubber, Kleinheinz said.

And -- most importantly for Ohio farmers the lucrative dandelions are expected to grow well in the state.

"The pieces are coming together," Kleinhenz said.

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