Rubber – Sri Lanka’s best answer to global warming

By Dr L M K Tillekeratne, Senior Lecturer,
Dept of Chemistry,
Sri Jayawardhanapura University

It is very clear from the award of the Nobel Prize this year to Al Gore and his team that the main concern of all, especially of the United Nations is global warming, creating natural calamities all over the world. Scientists have predicted that if immedate action is not taken to compensate this, very soon many countries and cities including Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Singapore and Maldives will be submerged in water released to the ocean from the icebergs melting in the northern tip of the world.

Further, severe damage is predicted for plantation crops grown in Asian countries in the future as a result of this excess and unpredictable rain fall.

Already, paddy farmers of Sri Lanka do planting in between Yala and Maha seasons with the late arrival of the South West monsoon rains and face severe problems caused by the inter monsoon rains just at the commencement of harvesting.

This year in most parts of the country, paddy fields are being fully submerged in water when they are about to be harvested.

It is an accepted fact that the main cause for global warming which is creating floods and other natural calamities all over the world is due to the vast increase in the release of carbon dioxide gas into the atmosphere by industries, commonly known as the green house effect.

Hence, with reference to current Green House Gas reduction efforts, it is a known fact that production activities and industries are now driven towards off–setting Carbon Dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere through a natural process called the Sequestration.
Natural process of producing latex in Heavea rubber trees, which consists of tiny rubber particles made out of a pure hydrocarbon dispersed in water in colloidal form, involves a significant amount of CO2 absorption from the atmosphere.

Unlike in other crops, the presence of other plant nutrients in the raw rubber harvested from the rubber tree is insignificant. Further, during the wintering period, unlike most of the other trees, rubber trees return all the leaves along with the nutrients absorbed during the year, back to the soil.

That is why manuring matured rubber plantation is not essential unlike in the case of other plantation crops. Hence, it is accepted that the “Rubber Tree” is the best known Natural Machine” for carbon sequestration.

According to the International Rubber Research and Development Board, 138.9 MT of carbon is sequestered by a hectare of rubber plantation with 300 mature trees per hectare in its 25 year existence in the field. In order to increase productivity, if the sand of rubber trees is increased to 415 per ha, as it is now done in all rubber producing countries, this figure is 192 MT per hectare in 25 years or 7.69 MT of carbon per hectare per year.

These sequestration data are normally expressed in MT of carbon. But by taking carbon to carbon dioxide proportion in the conversion equation, in the event of sequestration of 1 MT of carbon, the tree would have absorbed 3.66 MT of CO2 from the atmosphere. Hence it is under strong consideration by the industrialized countries in the world now to trade for carbon sequestrated by rubber growing countries in the near future under the Koyoto protocol.

The decision of the Sri Lankan government to plant rubber in the dry zone of the country, particularly in Monaragala district supported by the IFAD is expected to improve the economy and the environment while providing firewood requirement for domestic cooking and for industries in the whole country.

With the increase in fuel and electricity and LP gas prices, the firewood utilization is also increasing and hence, growing rubber is one of the solutions to address that problem too.

Sri Lanka introduced the chemical treatment of rubber wood for furniture manufacture to the whole world as far back as 1976. Today Malaysia is the largest exporter of treated rubber wood based furniture and their annual turnover from rubber wood based products export alone is quite high.

If not for this introduction of the utilization of a non precious wood like rubber wood after Boron treatment for this purpose, more and more trees in the forests all over the world would have been felled already for this purpose.

Rubber Seed oil after chemical modification is a proven replacement for diesel to be used in motor vehicles.

However, the modern high yielding clones introduced by the RRI Sri Lanka produce a low seed yield compared to the wild varieties planted decades ago.

But, if the demand rises, RRI scientists are capable of producing new high yielding clones with a potential to produce high seed yields as well.