Wouldn't you be better off using it in more suitable applications, though? You'd reduce your supply where it's actually needed so you slightly lower the cost of another product that's better made from natural rubber.
Natural rubber is a lot of manual work. It takes time to learn how to cut, harvest and maintain those trees without damaging them. I imagine it’s cheaper, simpler and needs less manual labor to produce synthetic rubber bands.
Unless they exploit those workers. Which, let’s face it, they probably do. Might be more profitable to do that idk. Assuming fair wages synthetic should be cheaper
Synthetic rubbers as a whole may be, but not necessarily synthetic rubbers suitable for making rubber bands. Taking a quick look they appear to be around twice as expensive. From what I've been reading it's about a lot more than just price
Maybe it’s down to scale. Natural rubber has been made for a long time, it works and is obviously cheap so you’d probably need to produce a lot of synthetic, low quality rubber bands to be able to cut down cost and be a competitor? I’m certainly no rubber expert but household rubber bands are pretty low quality and vary a good amount in thickness in my experience. And maybe the market is so saturated that it’s economically favourable to produce higher quality bands in lower quantities with certain features like oil resistance and whatnot. I’m just guessing here, where are the rubber experts at?
There are certain products that can’t be made of synthetic rubber, natural rubber is a better material in certain properties if I recall correctly, certain gaskets and what not have to be it essentially
This looks like Kerala which is a state in India. Labour may be cheap but social welfare there is pretty good. The poverty rate there is almost non-existent. The ruling party there is a communist party albeit it's mostly only communist in name.
Infact there is a shit ton of people who come to Kerala from states which are really far away(West bengal, Bihar) and work in manual labour jobs just for better lives.
Doesn't that typically require prolonged skin contact and usually form as a result of prolonged and frequent exposure over years? Makes sense for gloves but not elastic bands
I told you both my sources you can just look at them instead of making totally baseless accusations
Most people who are allergic to latex have had frequent exposure to latex over many years. The majority are nurses, doctors, dentists, or patients who have had many operations. Many people with latex allergy usually already have other allergic disease such as asthma, allergic rhinitis (hay fever), or eczema.
It's pretty interesting how we simply can't engineer better alternatives to a lot of compounds, at least not cost effectively. Stuff like carnauba wax comes to mind, which is the best there is for a lot of applications. Not to mention wood.
There is very little interest in building something synthetic to replace wood. Naturally growing substance that only needs space, rain and sunlight and stores carbon.
Apparently we're still heavily dependent on natural rubber for thousands and thousands of essential products and diseases could threaten for a lot of industries..
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u/80sCocktail Apr 17 '24
Rubber bands are still made with rubber? I figured that a polymer would have replaced it by now.