Rubber Ducks aren’t actually made of rubber. They’re plastic.

Though we don’t even think about it. Rubber allows our practices to function. It’s the elastic in our mask earloops, in our gloves, O-rings for your handpiece, air-water gaskets, hoses, colored bands to identify tools, the small cute organizer in cassettes, prophy cups, toothbrush handles, isolation dams, and rubber bands holding all the unused referral and lab scripts.

Don’t forget the tires on your car, elastic in your expandable pants, and for the safe sex practictioners, condoms all use natural rubber.

Because the entire supply chain is hidden away from us we are so unaware where rubber comes from. 

We have to start in Southeast Asia to find the most lowly rubber tree. Hevea brasiliensis. 90% of our producing rubber tree’s come from Asia. 60% of which are located in Thailand and Indonesia alone.

To harvest, a strip of swirling bark is removed ending in a tap in which a farmer takes the accumulated white sap. After mixing with a stabilizing chemical, the rubber is pressed and dried into square sheets before being sold for further processing before it becomes part of your patient’s stress ball. 

Three factors will threaten our ability to practice as we do, unless we innovate our use of natural rubber.

Disease.

Hevea brasiliensis originates from South America but is strictly prohibited from being exported out due to a very contagious leaf blight. Think maximum covid quarantine lockdown minus netflix and toilet paper.

And because the rubber tree is genetically homogenous, there is no disease resistance when you have hundreds of trees that don’t socially distance themselves.

Climate Change.

Drought and floods in Thailand wreak havoc on the rubber farms throughout the country. Farmers overtap their tree’s to meet demands. In doing so, the weakened trees are susceptible to disease. Sheesh, these rubber tree’s can’t get a break.

Capital Controls

Demand dropped like a rock when we all played hide and seek with each other in 2020. Well demand has spiked and we see another item becoming short supplied.

If you’re thinking why can’t we just grow more trees, supply issues are resolved right? It takes 7 years before a rubber tree becomes productive. 

And because the rubber industry is handled similarly to the dentist versus insurance industry, there are capital controls that dictate pricing against farmers to plant more rubber trees. Rubber farmers are called smallholders. Dentists are called a cottage industry. Tomato…Potato. 

Market pricing isn’t set by the farmers and the demand that is needed by the world, but by the insurance… in the rubber world, the Shanghai Futures Exchange which speculators force the price of rubber to stay artificially very low. 

This artificially separates the actual cost of producing rubber from what you can get in the market. Farmers are paid cent’s on the dollar for the rubber they produce. Volume is the only way to make up for the low compensation. Sounds eerily like State insurance…

Solution

It’s not all doom and gloom for natural rubber. But we will need tremendous innovation and some entrepreneurs to help us find an alternative. Synthetic rubber is getting better, but there are still properties we can’t completely emulate. There are a few prospect plants that can create rubber, but it will take a special entrepreneur to shift a labor intensive farming technique to an innovative automated technique.

For us in the dental industry. You and I are going to be subjected to see-saw pricing because of how interconnected we are to the supply chain of the world. Next time you’re snapping on your gloves, think about how you’re thriving because someone halfway across the world helps us succeed.

Cheers,

Lam