The rubber industry uses both natural and synthetic rubber. Tyres and tyre products account for approximately 60% of the synthetic rubber and 75% of the natural rubber used, and this industry employs ...about half a million workers worldwide. Important non-tyre uses of rubber include automotive belts and hoses, gloves, condoms and rubber footwear. Occupational health and safety in the rubber industry are major concerns. The first section of this book describes the rubber industries and rubber users industries whilst the remainder of the guide presents specific health and safety issues which are of interest to both employers and employees. This report takes a broad overview of the rubber industry and highlights the key concerns over safety that are currently being raised. Legislation in the UK and USA is discussed in depth. Safety of processing equipment is discussed as are the measures that can be taken to avoid injury from machinery. Rubber dust and fume exposures during rubber processing are considered to be general health hazards. Chemicals used in rubber manufacture/processing, particularly solvents have been responsible for many health effects in the rubber industry, these are outlined here. Recommendations for handling rubber chemicals are given. This book is a must-have for anyone working in the rubber industry whether as a producer of rubber or as a user of rubber to make end-use products. Both employers and employees working with rubber will find this book of interest.
Green synthesis and nanomaterials have been the current trends in biomedical materials. In this study, Piper chaudocanum L. leaf extract-doped ZnO nanoparticles (PLE-doped ZnO NPs), a novel ...nanomaterial, were studied including the synthesis process, and the biomedical activity was evaluated. PLE-doped ZnO NPs were synthesized by the co-precipitation method, with differences in the synthesis procedures and dosages of the extract. The X-ray diffraction, Fourier transform infrared, scanning electron microscopy, energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy, Brunauer–Emmett–Teller, ultraviolet-visible diffuse reflectance spectroscopy, and photoluminescence spectrum analysis results showed that the biosynthesized PLE-doped ZnO NPs were pure and in a hexagonal wurtzite phase. The PLE-doped NPs were synthesized by adding the extract to the zinc acetate solution before adjusting the pH and exhibited the smallest size (ZPS50 was 22 nm), the richest in the surface organic functional groups and the best optical activity. The highest antibacterial activity against P. aeruginosa and S. aureus was observed at 100 µg/mL of ZPS50 NPs, and the inhibition zone reached 42 and 39 nm, respectively. Moreover, ZPS50 NPs showed a moderate effectiveness against KB cancer cells with an ICsub.50 value of 43.53 ± 2.98 µg/mL. This present study’s results suggested that ZPS50 NPs could be a promising nanomaterial in developing drugs for treating human epithelial carcinoma cells and infectious illnesses.
The environment has been significantly impacted by the rubber industry through the release of large quantities of wastewater during various industrial processes. Therefore, it is crucial to treat the ...wastewater from the rubber industry before discharging it into natural water bodies. With the understanding that alarmingly depleting freshwater sources need to be preserved for future generations, this paper reviews the status of the rubber industry and the pollution caused by them, focusing mainly on water pollution. The review pays special attention to the recent advancements in wastewater treatment techniques for rubber industry wastewater categorizing them into pre-treatment, secondary, and tertiary treatment processes while discussing the advantages and disadvantages. Through a comprehensive analysis of existing literature, it was determined that organic content and NH4+ are the most frequently focused water quality parameters, and despite some treatment methods demonstrating superior performance, many of the methods still face limitations and require further research to improve systems to handle high organic loading on the treatment systems and to implement them in industrial scale. The paper also explores the potential of utilizing untreated or treated wastewater and byproducts of wastewater treatment in contributing towards achieving several United Nations sustainable development goals (UN-SDGs); SDG 6, SDG 7, SDG 9, and SDG 12.
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•Forecasted global industrial rubber market expansion is at CAGR of 5.2% by 2026.•Rubber industry uses high volumes of water in production (e.g. 20–50 L/1 kg of Crepe rubber, 50–60 L/1 kg of block rubber).•On average 20 tonnage manufacturing process generates 410 m3 of toxic effluent per day in a rubber factory.•Conventional techniques are inadequate to treat wastewater up to discharge standards.•Conventional to advanced treatment techniques used are reviewed in this paper.
In 1900 the manufacture of rubber products in the United States was concentrated in several hundred small plants around New York and Boston that employed low-paid immigrant workers with no ...intervention from unions. By the mid-1930s, thanks to the automobile and the Depression, production was concentrated in Ohio, the labor force was largely native born and highly paid, and labor organizations had a decisive influence on the industry. Daniel Nelson tells the story of these changes as a case study of union growth against a background of critical developments in twentieth-century economic life.The author emphasizes the years after 1910, when a crucial distinction arose between big, mass-production rubber producers and those that were smaller and more labor intensive. In the 1930s mass-production workers took the lead in organizing the labor movement, and they dominated the international union, the United Rubber Workers, until the end of the decade. Professor Nelson discusses not only labor's triumph over adversity but also the problems that occurred with union victories: the flight of the industry to low-wage communities in the South and Midwest, internal tensions in the union, and rivalry with the American Federation of Labor. The experiences of the URW in the late 1930s foreshadowed the longer-term challenges that the labor movement has faced in recent decades.Originally published in 1988.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
In the twenty-first century, land deals in the Global South have become increasingly prevalent and controversial. Transnational access to arable land in impoverished "land-rich" countries in Latin ...America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Southeast Asia highlights the link between the shifting geopolitics of economic development and problems of food security, climate change, and regional and international trade. Drawing on ethnographic and archival research, Upland Geopolitics uses the case of Chinese agribusiness investment in northern Laos to study the unbalanced geography of the new global land rush. Connecting the current rubber plantation boom to a longer trajectory of foreign intervention in the region, Upland Geopolitics reveals how legacies of Cold War conflict continue to pave the way for transnational enclosure in a socially uneven landscape. Upland Geopolitics is freely available in an open access edition thanks to TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem) and the generous support of Indiana University. DOI: 10.6069/9780295750507
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This work is focused on the recycling of natural rubber industry waste by means of thermo-mechanical devulcanization. With that aim, tests were carried out in an industrial twin-screw ...extruder, at different barrel temperatures, ranging from 80 to 220 °C. The extrusion was done with a screw profile specifically designed for the devulcanization process. The extent and quality of devulcanization were evaluated through the measurements of crosslink density, soluble fraction and Mooney viscosity, and by using the Horikx diagram. Results showed that a high degree of reclaiming (˜90%) was obtained, independently of the barrel temperature. The samples with the best devulcanization quality, i.e. the samples with a more selective sulfur bond scission, were found to be those treated at a lower input temperature. This was explained by the effect of the rubber homogenous self-heating which contributes to the local increase of the material temperature, during the devulcanization process. Moreover, it was found that the properties of the devulcanized rubber/virgin rubber blends were not significantly affected by the addition of the treated rubber. Results suggest that the entire natural rubber industry waste could be recycled into new competitive products, with low energy consumption. This would present a real contribution to the industrial recycling and thus a noticeable improvement of the environment.
The rubber tree, Hevea brasiliensis, is a species native to the Brazilian Amazon region and it supplies almost all the world's natural rubber, a strategic raw material for a variety of products. One ...of the major challenges for developing rubber tree plantations is adapting the plant to biotic and abiotic stress. Transcriptome analysis is one of the main approaches for identifying the complete set of active genes in a cell or tissue for a specific developmental stage or physiological condition. Here, we report on the sequencing, assembling, annotation and screening for molecular markers from a pool of H. brasiliensis tissues. A total of 17,166 contigs were successfully annotated. Then, 2,191 Single Nucleotide Variation (SNV) and 1.397 Simple Sequence Repeat (SSR) loci were discriminated from the sequences. From 306 putative, mainly non-synonymous SNVs located in CDS sequences, 191 were checked for their ability to characterize 23 Hevea genotypes by an allele-specific amplification technology. For 172 (90%), the nucleotide variation at the predicted genomic location was confirmed, thus validating the different steps from sequencing to the in silico detection of the SNVs.
Effluent from the rubber industry contains 2-mercaptobenzothiazole (2-MBT) as the major persistent pollutant. To remove 2-MBT, this study investigated the bioaugmentation of activated sludge with a ...2-MBT-degrading bacterial consortium, which was previously enriched from rubber wastewater sludge. The consortium was immobilized in a commercial porous carrier to increase its efficiency and stability. The 16S rRNA gene analysis showed that the dominant Pseudomonas spp. and Stenotrophomonas spp. were maintained when it was repeatedly used for 4 cycles in a minimal medium containing 300 mg L−1 2-MBT. For bioaugmentation, a stirred tank reactor containing the immobilized consortium and activated sludge at a 1:2 mass ratio was constructed and found to remove 88.2 % of 100 mg L−1 2-MBT from synthetic wastewater. When the rubber industrial wastewater was applied at an organic loading rate (OLR) range of 1.0–3.0 kg COD m−3 d−1, the bioaugmentation reactor had 2-MBT and COD removal efficiencies of 70–79 % and 83–96 %, respectively. The reactors with either immobilized consortium or activated sludge alone had lower treatment efficiency. The bacterial community and its predicted functions corresponded to the activity of the added consortium and the operation of the reactor. Consequently, bioaugmentation should be applied to activated sludge for the treatment of rubber wastewater.
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•A bioaugmentation reactor contained bacterial consortium and activated sludge.•Bacterial immobilization in porous carriers allowed long-term reactor operation.•Immobilized bacteria and sludge removed around 80 % 2-MBT in rubber wastewater.•Major bacterial populations were identified along with their predicted functions.•Bacterial interactions and functions correlated with the efficiency of reactor.
Zinc oxide (ZnO) is a fascinating wide band gap semiconductor material with many properties that make it widely studied in the material science, physics, chemistry, biochemistry, and solid-state ...electronics communities. Its transparency, possibility of bandgap engineering, the possibility to dope it into high electron concentrations, or with many transition or rare earth metals, as well as the many structures it can form, all explain the intensive interest and broad applications. This review aims to showcase ZnO as a very versatile material lending itself both to bottom-up and top-down fabrication, with a focus on the many devices it enables, based on epitaxial structures, thin films, thick films, and nanostructures, but also with a significant number of unresolved issues, such as the challenge of efficient p-type doping. The aim of this article is to provide a wide-ranging cross-section of the current state of ZnO structures and technologies, with the main development directions underlined, serving as an introduction, a reference, and an inspiration for future research.
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