Michael Fraley, CEO of PanAridus, announced at the International Tire Exhibition and Conference held on September 26, 2012 that the company would be providing the first samples of the domestically grown guayule rubber to manufacturers of tires and other rubber-based products.
PanAridus has employed sustained research, agronomics and genetics to successfully decode the Rosetta Stone and is a significant milestone for the company considering that previous endeavors to find domestic alternatives to synthetic rubber derived from petroleum and Hevea rubber procured from Asia have been plagued by uncertainty.
Fraley stated that the release of the first set of samples hold the distinction of being the rubber industry’s first attempt to independently assess the ability of the guayule rubber to comply with the required standards that would make it an economical raw material replacement for tires and rubber products.
PanAridus, which is located in Casa Grande in Arizona, had only a single mission which was to promote the cultivation of drought-tolerant crops in dry areas. The company started with the cultivation of the desert plant native to Sonora known as guayule. This move came a century after the first investment was made in this crop by John D. Rockefeller Jr. The Guayule plant is literally waste-free as the entire plant has applications for making resin, rubber and feedstock for biomass.
Fraley attributed the success of their endeavor to the acquisition of the largest privately owned germ-plasm bank for guayule followed by the development of patented genetic strains by experts in their Casa Grande facility.
Source: http://www.panaridus.com
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