Science: Odorless Rubber

If rubber had no odor, it might find profitable uses in milk cans, beer vats and food containers. Last week from London came news that two chemists of the Rubber Growers’ Association had located and practically eliminated rubber’s inherent smell.

In “wild” rubber (collected from virgin forests), putrefaction produces a disgusting smell. But most U. S. rubber comes from man-arranged plantations. Plantation rubber gets its smell from the sulphur or nitrogenous accelerators required to cure the rubber for commercial use. The Rubber Growers’ chemists, H. P. Stevens and E. J. Parry, have been unable to find substitute accelerators as good as the smelly ones. On the other hand they found that zinc carbonate added during the manufacturing process reduced smells to a minimum, and very simply. More complicated and costly is the purification of the latex (the original rubber fluid tapped from the trees) by digestion with dilute caustic, centrifuging, creaming, dialysis, or ultrafiltration.