Rubber Tree

Rubber comes from the rubber tree. People use rubber for many things. Some examples are – gloves, balloons, erasers, gloves, tyres and many more. The rubber comes from the latex which is the sap of rubber tree. Most plants have latex but not all can form rubber.

I saw all this, when I went to Anantya Resorts and they took us to a nearby place called Vaikundam Plantations. They also took us to 2 viewpoints and a water falls for a trek which took us about 3 hours. Walked through the beautiful plantations and saw many interesting things like a red snail, tiny ladybug, touch me not plant.

These are the rubber trees. These rubber trees were planted in 2013. They take 7 years to grow to begin tapping from that tree. So this is the first year that these trees are tapped. They live upto 45 years. They use the wood of the tree to make plywood. The leaves sheds once a year and new leaves form. New leaves don’t form on the same branch but from the new branches above. These new leaves in the light green stage forms nectar. This happens around the month of January and February. These leaves attract the bees, so honey manufacturers collect the honey during this season. Oil is extracted from the rubber seed. So all products of the rubber plants are used.

This is the special knife used to cut the bark of rubber tree. They slit it in a thin downward curve. In the morning they slit the bark to tap the latex.

This is the latex coming down after the bark is slit. It flows for 5 hours and then it begins to coagulate and stops. Around noon the latex is collected before they harden in the shells. The shield that is in the picture looks a lot like skirt to me! It is to protect the latex collected while it rains.

The latex which are collected in the coconut shell are added with some chemicals and they are let to get firm in a tray. Then they are air dried in a rack. This is not the final product.

To get the finished product, they move the racks to the firewood baking area. They keep it in a low temperature to get the golden coloured sheets, which are the finest quality rubber. If they are not dried well, fungus will grow on them. These fine quality of rubber are used to make aeroplane tyres, other tyres and branded shoes.

The dried latex is collected by scraping the left over dried latex in the coconut shell or in the bark of a tree. They are melted, just let to air dry and collected. For these left over latex, the whole process is not required. These are used for making erasers, balloons, gloves and more.

This is the amount of latex collected in 3 hours while we went for the trek!