Rubber supply chains need more than luck | Rubber News

Oct 17, 2024

The Longshoremen strike that launched Oct. 1 ended up being among the lucky variety.

Lucky in the sense that it lasted just three days and led to backlogs of just about three weeks. Because the strike—which closed every port along the East and Gulf coasts—could have been much worse had it drug on for weeks, as the United Auto Workers' strikes did late last year.

This time, though, the rubber industry got lucky.

Again.

And it leaves us wondering just how much luck is left to go around.

Because something big is bound to happen again, something that completely upends industry supply chains. And those left the most vulnerable are connected to natural rubber, the critical material that finds its way into more than 50,000 different products.

During a presentation at the ACS Rubber Division's spring technical meeting, Whitney Luckett, president of Simko North America, challenged attendees to think critically about rubber industry supply chains. Supply chains that she notes are 15,000 miles long.

Luckett said that in the years ahead, the industry is going to face a lot of adversity. From geopolitics, unexpected transportation hiccups and—most especially—from extreme weather events caused by climate change.

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"I kind of pine for those 2018-2019 days when we reached levels of 90 percent schedule reliability," Luckett said during her presentation. "We haven't seen anything like that (lately). COVID was taking us down 10-20 percent. … I think that, in the coming decade, we are going to long for the days of COVID."

And it is, perhaps, climate-related events that could have the biggest impact on the rubber industry, especially when it comes to natural rubber. The industry, after all, relies nearly entirely on hevea natural rubber—which is susceptible to blights and disease, given its monoclonal nature and the inability of farmers to properly protect their crop due to low wages and extremely low commodity prices.

And that doesn't even take into account the severe flooding from heavy rains that have impacted NR growing regions in recent years.

Thus far, rubber industry supply chains are and have been resilient, yes. They've managed to survive port closures, Red Sea blockades and geopolitical upheavals. They managed to make it through a pandemic, for goodness' sake.

But that doesn't mean we should continue with the status quo.

As Luckett encouraged, it's critical to rethink our supply chains and look for ways to strengthen and shorten them.

For natural rubber, more specifically, that means commercial scaling—as quickly as possible—alternative NRs such as guayule and TKS dandelion rubbers.

Such steps are imperative.

In the meantime, though, the industry is going to have to create some luck of its own, simply by planning ahead for just about any eventuality.

"The best thing you can do, though," Luckett told Rubber News earlier this year, "is just make sure you have something on this side of the pond."

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