(suspenseful music)
- Gee-whiz.
- When I was a kid, I was pretty sure
I knew how the world was going to end,
alien invasion,
giant lizard attack,
or zombie apocalypse.
And even though some people are still convinced
that Godzilla, flying saucers
and the body snatchers are on the way.
Today, there's a more immediate apocalyptic threat,
the potential disappearance of a crucial global commodity
we rely on in ways we don't even realize,
one specific commodity that's so important, so ubiquitous,
nearly everything in the world depends on it.
And if our supply were to ever run out,
the global economy would grind to a halt.
I bet you think I'm talking about oil.
Think again.
This is the rubber episode.
Whether you like it or not, we're all connected by money.
I'm Kal Penn, exploring this giant beast
that is the global economy.
(upbeat rock music)
To truly appreciate how much we rely on rubber,
I need to get a taste of it in a monster dose.
[Kal] Philadelphia,
this is Monster Jam!
Monster Jam rolls on mammoth tires.
And nothing else but natural rubber
can handle the impact of those sick monster truck jumps.
Besides tires, rubber has crammed its way
into just about everything, from the clothes you wear
to the items around your house and beyond.
Rubber lets you bounce in this super fun thing.
And these super fun things.
Yeah, that's a whole different kind of bounce.
Natural rubber is a $26 billion industry.
It is the backbone of the economy.
The world's demand for natural rubber
is about 13,000 kilometric tons a year,
or the equivalent of 86,868 blue whales.
That's a lot of rubber.
(engine revving)
And Monster Jam has a huge demand for it.
What?! What?!
Yeah!
I wanna ask you about rubber.
You're like the rubber guy.
- The rubber guy.
- I'm not sure if I like that. - (Kal laughs)
- Bill Easterly is responsible for putting tires
on all those Monster Jam trucks.
With 33 years of motor sports experience,
he knows a lot about when the rubber hits the road,
or dirt, or whatever.
So you know a lot about tires.
How important are tires and rubber to Monster Jam?
- Well, we can't perform without 'em. - Yeah.
- We have trucks that are jumping in the air,
landing on the ground at 20 Gs.
The truck weighs 12,000 pounds.
The math is almost a quarter million pounds
of force hitting the ground.
The tires have to survive that repeatedly.
So the tires are very important.
- How much do tires like this cost?
- These tires can cost $3,000.
- People ask-- - Each?
- Each. Yeah. - [Kal] Oh, whoa.
- What we do to tires isn't fair to begin with,
sending them 30 feet in the air, crashing these trucks
all over the floor, crushing over cars.
We can damage a tire once in a while.
So we have to build an extra, extra strong tire
to withstand what we do to them.
Natural rubber builds a great extra strong product
so that we can be the type of performers we are.
- [Kal] There are synthetic rubbers made from petroleum,
but the most vital rubber products can't be synthetic.
Why?
In the face of heat, abrasion and age,
synthetic rubber just won't hold up.
Synthetic rubber plane tires?
Don't even think about it.
They can't handle the landing,
and they would blow up on the runway.
It's the same with long-haul trucks driving cross country.
Synthetic rubbers can't take the beating.
Natural rubber is the only substance known to man
that can do the things that planes,
trucks, and these monsters need.
But natural rubber is in real danger of disappearing,
and if it does, it would be the end of Monster Jam
and nearly everything else you depend on in life.
This is the source of natural rubber, the raw sap or latex
from the Brazilian rubber tree, Hevea Brasiliensis.
These trees are monoclonal,
meaning this tree and this tree
and this one all share the exact same genetic makeup.
Which also means that they're all susceptible
to the same disease.
That disease is a fungus called Rubber Tree Blight,
Microcyclus ulei.
For a rubber tree, it's like the Black Death,
the Spanish flu, and Ebola combined.
There's no vaccine or cure.
How scary is an outbreak?
Well, since all rubber trees are basically
identical siblings, this disease has the potential
to destroy the entire rubber industry.
With all this potential devastation and a clear threat
to our global supply of rubber, who do you call
when that vicious little spore has big plans?
Only the most extreme, badass,
take no prisoners plant pathologist.
- Can I wear this? - Indeed, you can.
- I got an honorary doctorate once
- for doing nothing. - You did?
Well, that's the usual--
- So we are both doctors. - Oh, we are indeed.
- But you actually know what you're doing.
- Yeah, well, my career has actually been
mainly in the tropics.
I've worked mainly on tropical crops,
coffee, cacao and rubber.
- Let's get some rubber trees to cough
and see how they're doing.
Dr. Harry Evans has had over 40 years of experience
battling plant and fungal diseases.
He spends most of his time in the lab,
cataloging archived specimens, including leaf blight.
- And this would the first place that rubber material
would come from, almost certainly from Asia,
and to where disease is suspected, rubber blight.
- [Kal] Okay. - This specimen here is in fact rubber blight
from Trinidad from the 1980s.
These are called shot holes,
and that's what happens to the leaves.
- You see the shot holes. - (gunshot bangs)
- [Kal] Yeah. - And all the leaves fall out,
and eventually, the leaf will fold prematurely,
and the whole tree will be defoliated,
and possibly death of the tree after that.
The collector here, Chi, was Malaysian,
and he was looking at all aspects of the disease
to make himself acquainted with it.
So in fact, when you look at it, you can--
- I'm sorry. - I'm laughing because
in Hindi, "chi" means shit.
So this is Dr. Shit who sent you these samples.
- Yeah, so what Chi's sort of descriptions,
the first people on the scene may be able to say,
"Yes, that's rubber blight."
And looking simply down this microscope, at it,
you see those structures there.
- [Kal] Oh, yeah, wow.
- [Dr. Evans] Yeah, so that's the eruption.
And what happens then, it pushes the leaf out
and then it becomes like this Swiss cheese--
- I mean when you say eruption,
that actually looks like a mountain range.
- Yeah, yeah.
At that magnification, yeah.
Within those are the structures holding the sexual spores.
- [Kal] Okay. - Which are then violently
released and carry on the process.
This is a viable structure.
It's a mountain range.
So it's protected, and inside are the spores.
And it's a very slow-growing fungi.
It's three or four weeks.
- It takes three or four weeks to get to that stage?
- To get to that sort of growth.
- Whoa! Okay. - Yeah.
- So if you put a little sample of that in there,
in four weeks, it would look like that?
- [Dr. Evans] Yeah.
- And if they find rubber blight
or if you find rubber blight rather,
they send you a sample, by the time you get it,
is it too late to do something about it?
- The alarm bells would go.
Once this disease gets going through a plantation,
it just wipes it out.
- It's already happened once before.
A hundred years ago, 90% of all the world's
natural rubber supply came from Brazil,
which led to companies like Ford creating massive
rubber plantations to make tires for their cars.
In the 1930s, leaf blight attacked,
jumping from tree to tree so fast
that by the time it was discovered, it was too late.
This tiny spore laid waste
to almost all the trees in South America.
Ford had invested $20 million into the plantation,
or roughly $280 million in today's dollars.
They ended up selling it back to Brazil
for a little over 1% of what they had invested.
Now, Brazil's share of the rubber market
has dropped from 90% to 0.001%.
Where are the other rubber plantations?
- The majority are in Asia, 90%, 95%.
- [Kal] Oh, 95% of industrial rubber
for the whole world is-- - Natural rubber,
it would be Asian in origin, yes.
- Got it. So then it's fairly targeted.
If leaf blight would have hit there,
it could disrupt most of our rubber supply.
- Yes, I think, well,
it would disrupt the whole world economy.
There's no geographic barriers after that.
It would spread throughout the whole region, like it spread
toward the whole of South and Central America.
If it were to arrive,
I think it would be very difficult to contain it.
- [Kal] What would happen if leaf blight managed to spread
across the Pacific Ocean and take hold in Asia?
Not only would it spell the end to my monster truck rallies,
it could take a sledgehammer to our global economy.
Could you imagine?
If not, let me help you.
And here we are.
The apocalypse looks like this, where all planes
are grounded and the world comes to a screeching halt.
- [Dr. Cornish] You see how massive these things are.
- [Kal] Yeah, that's huge.
I guess this is all still being help up by--
- [Dr. Cornish] Yeah, held up by rubber tires. (chuckles)
- [Kal] I'm here to find out what a world
without all this rubber would mean for us.
An airplane graveyard where one-time titans of the skies
are hacked apart and salvaged for scraps.
So these tires--
- [Dr. Cornish] 100% natural rubber.
- [Kal] Even these. - [Dr. Cornish] Almost certainly
because they're such heavy duty.
I hear we can see in here there might be some bits left.
There would have been some seals
and gaskets and things in there.
- I assume this has rubber components, or is it all plastic?
- Well, here's the rubber.
- Oh, okay. - There's some rubber there.
There might be some rubber in these luxury pads
so your glass of alcohol or champagne doesn't slip.
- So would anything up here be made out of rubber?
- [Dr. Cornish] Yeah, you got it.
- [Kal] Dr. Katrina Cornish has been trying to warn us all
about the economic consequences of a world without rubber.
And she has a very clear message
about this potential rubber crisis.
- We must not continue to rely
on a clonal tree that is disease sensitive.
This is a ridiculous way to run a global economy.
- [Kal] Is leaf blight a real threat?
- Absolutely. Over the last 20 years,
it's appeared in India once, in Thailand once.
And then it was wholesale extermination
of everything in sight to control it.
If you try and fly on an airplane
from South America to Southeast Asia,
you'd be very hard pressed to find a flight.
You have to go somewhere else and get off the plane,
get on a plane that hasn't been to South America,
and it's to do with leaf blight quarantine.
- Is that right? - Yeah, yeah.
It can't make the ocean crossing because it's quite short lived,
but it can make the airplane crossing.
- So if this happens and if these trees
start getting wiped out, what happens to the economy
or the impact of not getting rubber?
- There would, it would be a catastrophic economic collapse.
There's no sector of the modern economy
that isn't completely dependent
upon the availability of natural rubber.
You are going to lose, eventually,
the entire modern world.
You are going to lose it.
We are going to go back 120, 130 years to what you can do.
- Oh, wow. - Yes.
You know, ox carts, we go back to ox carts or something.
You know, horses and leather.
There's nothing, medicine, transportation, you name it.
- So how do we solve the rubber problem?
- We solve the rubber problem
by increasing the biodiversity of the rubber supply
and doing that as quickly as we possibly can.
- So there's an opportunity for governments to invest now.
- Absolutely. But you know, we're not good at that.
Something catastrophic happens,
it's like, "Oh, gosh, that was a bad thing."
And the fact that dozens of people might be saying,
"This is gonna happen. This is gonna happen.
"This is gonna happen. "This is gonna happen."
"Oops, did we know this was gonna happen?"
"Well, we've been trying to tell you.
"You wouldn't listen.
"You didn't want to be proactive.
"You wanted to be reactive."
- [Kal] So why isn't the global economy doing something
to counter the potential effects of leaf blight?
It turns out economies have the tendency
to not address the very problems that might affect them,
the kinds of problems that could happen
just about any place that money changes hands.
- When someone talks about uncertainty in the economy,
they're likely referring to externalities, outside variables
that can affect everyone connected to the market.
Externalities can be positive, like last year in 2004
when MySpace opened up a headquarters down the road.
Stable jobs for years to come! (laughs)
But more often, externalities take the form
of catastrophes, ecological diseases like leaf blight,
natural disasters like hurricanes,
and even man-made fuck-ups like a nuclear meltdown,
or in my case, the fact that my house was built
on an ancient burial ground.
Look what attacked me in my sleep.
- Oh, how much for the bones?
- They're not for sale, you monster.
Okay, seven bucks.
Now to make ends meet, I have to sell all this shit.
When I bought this stuff,
the market didn't price in the externalities
that now make this crap impossible to sell.
I can't believe I didn't get a discount on my Hummer
in case of a spike in gas prices.
- What's it cost to fill up the tank?
- Infinity dollars.
I paid 15 bucks a pop for these CDs,
but now I'm letting them go for $0.50 each.
Ooh, except for the Papa Roach.
Collector's item.
If you buy 'em, you could take the records for free.
Vinyl's never coming back. (chuckles)
Oh, Google is over $100 a share?
(chuckles) Now that it's clearly topped out,
I'll cash out and move to a place that has no burial ground.
- I heard that New Orleans doesn't bury their people underground.
- Well, it looks like this guy is headed out to the Big Easy.
- [Woman] (chuckles) Safe travels.
- Thanks, lady. (chuckles)
New Orleans in 2005, what could go wrong?
(thunder rumbles)
- [Kal] So what does this looming externality of leaf blight
mean for the people in the rubber supply chain?
To find out, I'm starting my journey
at the beginning of the natural rubber trail.
Thailand produces more than a third
of the planet's rubber on plantations just like this one
in the middle of what used to be a rainforest.
This is Bo.
His job is to harvest the raw rubber or latex.
His workday is just beginning.
Like the condom, latex is tapped all night,
into the early morning because during the day,
the jungle heat causes the latex to coagulate too quickly.
That's where the metaphor falls apart.
- [Bo] First, you remove last night's dried latex.
- Tap the tree slowly. - [Kal] Oh, wow.
Wow!
- Okay?
- [Kal] How long does that take to fill up?
- It takes about six hours to fill up.
- [Kal] How many trees do you do at one time.
- It is...
one thousand trees.
Sometimes it can be up to twelve hundred trees.
- Wow.
It takes about two years for a tree to produce enough rubber
to make one regular car tire, not even a monster truck tire.
As you guys can see, it's raining.
In reality, these guys don't tap rubber trees in the rain
because the water dilutes the latex.
But we've got like 20 people behind the camera,
came to the middle of Thailand, it's three o'clock
in the morning, for the rubber episode, so here we are.
- Now, just one tree left.
And then we are going to weigh it.
Come.
- [Kal] After tapping latex all night,
Bo is collecting buckets of the white liquid.
- We're going to weigh it now.
- [Kal] Once the buckets are filled,
Bo must drive to the plantation weigh station
to find out how much he'll earn for the night's work.
This plantation contains 475 acres of rubber trees.
If just a few spores of blight landed here,
the trees could all be wiped out in just a few weeks.
There are 30 tappers like Bo
who both live and work on this plantation.
Once the rubber is weighed,
the plantation owner will pay them.
- My father bought this property
and started planting rubber trees.
- He bought it specifically for rubber trees?
- [Dr. Thitadilok] Yeah.
- [Kal] When the Thai government offered incentives
to rubber farmers eight years ago,
the owner of this plantation, Dr. Chukiet,
planted many new trees.
Though a rubber tree can last for 25 years,
it takes seven years for one to mature.
So he has only recently seen any return on his investment.
So what's happening out there?
- We bring the latex in from the tapping tree, okay?
And now we go to measure the weight.
How much it weighs, okay?
And today's price is 47 baht per kilo.
- [Kal] 47 baht per kilo. That's today's price.
- Yeah, today's price. - How do you know what today's price is?
We have to call the factory.
- Oh, the factory will tell you?
[Dr. Thitadilok] Yeah.
- [Kal] 47 baht per kilo equates to about
US $1,300 per ton of liquid rubber.
Dr. Chukiet splits the earnings with the tappers 60/40,
which means that Bo will get only about nine bucks.
In Thailand, that's less than the daily minimum wage.
- This is the problem that we have,
problem with nowadays.
- Worker shortage because of the low price. - Okay.
The workers prefer to tap when the price is high.
- [Kal] Yeah. - We couldn't recruit new workers
when the old worker resigns, okay?
We couldn't find a new one to replace.
Before we used to be able to produce about six tons.
- Six tons.
- Per day.
Right now, it's two tons per day.
- [Kal] Two tons a day?
- Yeah. - Wow.
So that dropped by more than half.
- More than half. That's why our production
become low now.
- [Kal] Okay. Have the prices been low the whole time,
or is it just recently?
Oh, The price now,
the price has been down for a couple of years now.
- It's been down? - Yeah. It's about...
now, it's about thirty percent of what it used to be.
- It's 30% of what it used to be?
- Yes!
- Three years ago? - Two years ago.
It's quite a problem in Thailand.
Business before, we used to live on
rubber plantation as the main income.
And now we try to shift our rubber to
to coconut or to palm oil production.
And we start to diversify our business.
And now we cut down the
the old rubber tree.
- [Kal] I don't understand.
If leaf blight is such a threat to the rubber supply
and demand for natural rubber is always on the rise,
why are the prices so low
that farmers like Dr. Chukiet are losing money
and considering chopping down their rubber trees?
So where does the rubber go from here?
- Okay, then after it's ready,
we get the latex from the tank to the van.
- Send it to the factory. - Okay.
So these whole things go.
- Go to factory.
- [Kal] If Dr. Chukiet says that he gets the price
from the factory, then that's where I'm headed
to find out exactly why it's so low.
This rubber factory is owned by Robert Meyer.
In eight short years, he went from one factory to 38.
He now produces 14% of all the world's rubber.
Those drums of gooey latex look like this
when Robert gets through with them,
before he sells them to a tire company.
- Kal, you can feel this is number one, warm.
And it's sticky.
- It is! Whoa! - So the process of baking
has done two things.
It has stabilized
the decomposition of the product.
So the organic deterioration has been stopped
because it has been baked.
And it amplifies the adhesion properties.
- Okay.
And it turns brown from the drying process?
- Yeah. Like a cookie. - Yeah.
- So these are the weighing stations
where two biscuits are put on top of each other.
Small bits are cut off or added
- to make exactly a thirty-five kilo brick. - [Kal] Cool.
- So here are now with finished products. - [Kal] Okay.
So this is where the Wonka bars get shipped out.
- That's the job of a rubber factory
is to convert the agricultural produce into an industrial material.
- [Kal] Yeah, that's really cool.
- So as you would have figured out, right?
We have two handovers which are relevant.
Farmer handing over an agricultural produce to the factory.
Factory handing over an industrial raw material
to the maker of rubber products.
Right, those are the two handover points
where the baton passes to the next part of the value chain.
- Are you worried about leaf blight?
Is that a serious concern?
- Everybody is always worried about leaf blight.
- (laughs) Okay. - Okay?
Now that little bug hasn't made,
found its way to Southeast Asia.
Look, maybe I'm too naive,
or maybe I'm too emotionally invested
in what I do to really think about that too much.
But even if it came to Southeast Asia,
it would be cause for a cost explosion of rubber.
- But it sounds like that cost
isn't factored into that current price.
And then talking to rubber farmers,
and they're saying in the last three years,
the price they're getting for their latex has dropped dramatically.
- Tremendously. - [Kal] Help me understand why that is.
- Okay, to understand that,
you really have to understand the history of rubber.
Okay, so back in the day, there was a huge disconnect
in terms of time, in terms of connectivity,
being able to speak with one another
between the origin and the consumer.
So if you're a buyer, say you're a tire maker,
and I'm a seller, you wanna know that you can buy
this product not just today from what I have in the warehouse,
but you wanna have this product throughout the year.
- Okay. - Because you depend on it.
- Okay. - So in order to bridge that, they created a futures market,
and the rubber was traded on a futures market.
- Can you explain what a futures market is?
- Okay, so a futures market is where a buyer and a seller
agree to certain terms of price, of volume,
of grades, of specification, of origin,
basically everything which you'd find in a contract,
for delivery at some point in the future.
- Okay.
- So if I was a producer and I agree to supply you tonnage
at price, at date, you will buy from an American trader
who had an office in New York,
who had a subsidiary in Singapore, and he will transact
either directly or through another layer of middle men
with the original producer, i.e. me.
- [Kal] Okay. - And between us, we would guarantee
that we would supply you what you want
at the agreed price on the agreed date.
So the futures market is a venue where, frankly speaking,
I have very little say, if any.
Even my customers don't have a say.
If you speak to most of my customers,
they will tell you that they want higher prices
because they know the farmers are about to say enough,
but neither of us who participate physically have control.
- We're gonna need to understand futures better.
- A futures contract is kinda like a concert ticket.
Tickets could sell months before I actually perform.
The contract is based on demand.
I wouldn't charge $100 to see me in an arena
if I didn't think I could sell it out.
- Ha-ha, girl, you are too humble.
You can sell out the moon.
Ooh, tour on the moon.
- Thank you, hype man. - Ha.
- I sell these concert tickets way in advance
- because it minimizes risk. - Hmm.
- I worked so hard on this upcoming tour.
I wrote an entire new album.
I choreographed all the background dancers all by myself.
- I mean, when I say it's dope as hell, it is dope as hell.
- So I need guarantees
that I'm gonna get paid for that hard work.
- Mm-hmm. - And my fans want guarantees
that they're gonna be able to see it.
- I guarantee if I don't see this show,
I'ma lose my shit, literally.
It's just gonna open up and fall out.
People are gonna be like, "Ugh, what is that?"
I don't know.
- So concert tickets are futures contracts,
and scalpers are futures traders.
- Mmm. - Of course, due to market volatility,
these scalpers can actually lose money,
like if I decided to livestream my concert for free.
- Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no.
You would literally break the internet.
- We can't have that. - I hope I won't have to.
But here's the worst part.
Scalpers buy so many tickets that they control
significant supply, which means they can set the price.
And that is market manipulation.
- Your shows are market price.
You're like the lobster on a menu.
- Yeah, I am a lobster. - Go get 'em, girl.
- [Meghan] Hello, Cleveland!
- While I go get this money
for the rest of these Meghan Trainor tickets.
I got Meghan Trainor tickets.
They're going fast.
Show starts now. (laughs)
- So who are the scalpers in the rubber industry?
It's these guys, traders on the commodity futures markets.
Futures traders buy up those contracts,
speculating that over time, their value will increase.
The trader's goal is to buy low, sell high
and get rich by pocketing the difference.
(upbeat music)
Singapore is one of the biggest financial hubs in the world.
It's where thousands of commodities futures contracts
are traded everyday.
And one of the guys who used to trade
those rubber contracts is Dar Wong.
For 30 years, he worked for big investment companies
and now travels around Asia,
offering advice to struggling rubber farmers.
If we need rubber so badly, if everybody in the world needs it--
- Everybody needs some. - [Kal] Clothes, glasses, wires.
- Yes.
- Why is the price so low?
- What actually influences the price volatility of the rubber
is the global inflation and recession.
- Okay. - For example,
in 2013, rubber prices started to fall,
and during this time, the Thailand government actually said
that rubber prices are probably going through a short-term correction.
But rubber prices actually did not recover,
and it went down lower and lower and lower.
Obviously, when the farmers started to realize
that prices are going down they start to give up tapping.
They said they want to chop it and remove the trees.
I think that is something
not very acceptable to the global rubber economy.
- So the farmer says the factory sets the price.
But then the factory says the futures traders set the price.
And the futures traders say
global inflation and recession sets the price.
Amidst all the finger pointing, how are the farmers
supposed to survive any of this volatility?
Wouldn't it be stupid of them to continue manufacturing rubber?
- We always encourage the farmers
start to look for alternate incomes,
keep the plantation alive,
because the prices are moving on a cycle.
There are up cycles, we have seen it.
There are down cycles.
And now we're still going in the down cycles.
And after the down cycle finishes,
the next up cycle will come.
So it's a matter of price oscillation.
- Okay.
Is leaf blight a real threat to rubber trees?
- I think... well...
it is a real thing.
However, I think we will leave this problem
to the plant doctors.
Because, you know, there is not really a remedy on this,
but I think nothing is worse than...
the farmers that want to chop it down.
Because once you chop the trees,
that's the end of the story.
- So you think the farmers
- are the greatest threat to the-- - Yes. Correct.
The farmers are the greatest threat.
When they start to give up in the business, in the industry,
they refuse to tap, they want to chop it...
or they just want to keep the plantation dormant.
I think that is the biggest threat.
- As essential as rubber is, you'd think the market
would do everything in its power to protect the supply.
This is Ma Nui.
She's a rubber farmer in Thailand
and what Dar Wong refers to as the greatest threat.
Cutting down her rubber trees
in the hopes to eventually build a modest cottage
for a better income is what she sees as her only option.
Is it hard to make decisions like cutting down the trees?
Or do you see it
as just part of changes that have to happen?
- I don't have the money to change or grow other things.
So, there is nothing else I can do.
It doesn't matter what I think of doing, you know?
I don't have the money to grow anything.
- I understand.
Ma Nui exemplifies the plight of many rubber farmers.
They're caught in the middle of a system
that's more concerned with stopping them
from destroying their trees than the loss
of the entire rubber industry to leaf blight.
Meanwhile, we're buying the latest running shoes
with no clue that the whole system
might run off a cliff at any moment.
If disease and economic disaster won't make the markets act,
are we just totally screwed?
Will the spectacle of monster truck rallies
go the way of pole sitting contests?
The invisible hard of the free market may be turning
a blind eye to the issue, but private industry
is starting to take some baby steps to cover their assets.
That takes us to the very last step
in the rubber supply chain, a very important researcher
named Carla in a tire factory in Germany.
Continental Corporation, one of the world's oldest
and biggest automotive companies,
is looking to develop mass quantities
of an alternative kind of rubber.
- [Carla] It smells like harvesting carrots, isn't it?
- Yeah, almost like an indica carrot sort of a smell.
Huh.
Continental has an annual revenue
of nearly $50 billion at risk.
- What is this made from? - From dandelion roots.
- Whoa.
Taraxacum kok-saghyz.
Continental is betting on the dandelion
as a potential game changer in the rubber industry
because unlike the rubber tree, dandelions are able
to be grown annually in moderate climates
and in soil that's not even suited for cultivation.
Dandelions are resilient.
Carla Recker is the one spearheading the effort,
and she's all business.
So how many trees, if you're using
the traditional rubber trees, would it take
for one tire versus how many dandelions?
- A rubber tree approximately produces one
to one and a half kilograms natural rubber per year.
- For one tire?
- For the one tire, you need almost two, two trees.
- And what about dandelions?
- It's not the plants which count there.
It's just the acreage which is used for that,
and our goal is to have the same yield per hectare in a year
like a rubber plantation.
- Can you talk to me about the differences
in how you source it?
So I know that for a rubber tree,
you tap the tree and the substance comes out.
They collect it in cups.
But what's it like with dandelions?
You just tap the dandelion and--
- No, that will not work because where the natural rubber
in a dandelion is is in the roots.
-So that's underneath the soil. - It's in the root.
- It's under the-- - It's in the root, yeah.
Therefore, you need a process which works.
- [Kal] Getting rubber from a dandelion
isn't as simple as notching a tree.
We're talking about thousands of plants that need to be
cultivated, harvested, and then their rubber extracted
through a complicated process
involving both human and machine.
- So here are the dry roots. It's very brittle.
And you can break it, and you see it still keeps together.
And then between, in the slit, you can observe
the very tiny strands of rubber which are inside.
- [Kal] Continental has sunk significant capital
into doing this.
- And that is what you have to separate out
by such a process, and then you get this beautiful material.
- [Kal] All in the hopes that this will pay off.
You've already made tires out of dandelions, right?
- [Carla] Right.
- Is there anything you're worried about in this process?
- Oh, you can worry about a lot of things being in that process
because we always are faced with problems every year.
You have too much rain, too less rain.
So you have all to handle this kind of agricultural risk,
which a farmer does every year.
But we have to learn that because we are
a rubber company and not a farming company.
- How did Continental decide to invest in dandelion rubber?
Was that you?
- I convinced the company to do so.
- How do you convince a huge global conglomerate
to invest in flower rubber?
- Yeah, you have to be, on the one hand side, enthusiastic,
but you have to have reasons for being so.
The future of natural rubber is essential for us
because the demand is still growing,
like the tire market is growing and expected to grow.
And that's the reason why we have to secure your own supply,
and therefore, we have to start now.
- Do you have a nickname here?
- (laughs) Some people call me (speaks in foreign language)
- or Miss Dandelion. - Miss Dandelion?
That's cool.
- It's not very much used.
We have Taraxacum tires here,
the blossoms of the Taraxacum here, and the seats.
This is the logo, how it looks like when it's on a tire itself.
- So whenever you see that-- - That's what that is, yeah.
- At a future time in the market,
then it is a Taraxacum tire.
- Oh, that's exciting.
I was reading that you guys are within five to 10 years
of being able to produce this industrially.
- Is that on track? - That's what we are working on,
but we have still a long way to go until we will be successful
into having that industrialized.
So I will not say that we will have solved the rubber crisis
for the whole world, but if we don't start now,
we will never be able to solve that problem.
- [Kal] Since markets don't seem like they'll save us
and there's no massive global collective action
to cure leaf blight--
- Hi. - Hey.
Maybe dandelions are the future lifeblood
of the global economy.
We're betting that the success of a few scientists
can create a global market for these small yellow flowers
in time to prevent a calamity.
Let's keep our fingers crossed
that we will be saved by another cycle of capitalism,
continually spinning round and round
like, uh, like, uh...
I wish I could come up with a handy metaphor for this.
(rock music)
Hopefully, things will turn out okay.
Maybe the rubber industry can be saved
and we can continue to wear shoes,
eat food, and enjoy Monster Jam.
But we'd better buckle up,
because it might be a bumpy ride.
(upbeat rock music)
- [Woman] Mark. - Hey, if you buy 'em,
you can take the records too. (chuckles)
I'm not-- That's an armrest I'm sitting on.
I overshot that chair. My apologies.
- Ha-ha-ha.
- Fuck. (laughs) Where do I start?
- I tell you what. I guarantee,
if I don't see this show, I'ma lose my shit.
I'm talking about onto the floor.
It's gonna be not good for anybody.
Literally, splat.
I will lose my shit.
I'm gonna have to start wearing a diaper.
That's crazy. Did you shit on the floor?
Who did that? My bad, I'm sorry.
(Meghan giggles)