PanAridus first to produce test quality guayule

Just after the summer of 2013 PanAridus reported that it had broke an industry milestone, becoming the first bio-agricultural company to produce sufficient quality and quantity of guayule rubber samples in-house for commercial testing and use.

Then last Autumn offered to sell samples of their patented guayule to all tyre companies who wanted an alternative to tropically grown Hevea rubber in order to meet growing domestic and global needs. Within months, three of the top five tyre manufacturers in the world independently verified PanAridus guayule as a good polymer for tyre manufacturing.

Since that time, the company has designed and constructed (in association with tyre manufacturers) its own extraction equipment allowing it to not only grow and harvest its high-quality guayule seeds. The company now claims to be the only company in the world to be able to produce rolled sheets of the alternative rubber for tyre companies as they experiment with formulation of PanAridus guayule to make their products more sustainable and ensure they can meet the needs of a growing worldwide demand for cars.

“There’s been a great deal of interest in the guayule industry in Arizona—for good reason: it’s a native Sonoran Desert crop, it uses far less water than traditional crops and it can help the economy of the rural parts of our state,” said PanAridus CEO, Michael Fraley. “But sooner or later, someone was going to have to provide evidence that the 100-year dream to provide a domestic source of natural rubber that began with the likes of Thomas Edison could be turned into reality. We’re proud to say that after five years of sustained research and improved agronomics, we’ve been able to break this ‘glass ceiling’ and move on to the next phase of development—commercialization.”

As a result of these developments PanAridus reports that it will be able to provide “thousands of pounds of rubber”, which – say company representatives – puts the firm years ahead of competitors who are still in the preliminary stages of guayule seed development, or who haven’t produced any high grade guayule for commercial use.