Tofu, Veggie Burgers, and Now Tires? Soy Takes Over.
I suppose it all started with tofu, some three thousand years ago. Logically, soymilk, with its nine essential amino acids quickly followed. Many of us, as infants, were fed soy formula instead of milk. Now you can walk in to just about any major chain restaurant and find a veggie burger, made from soy. But the soy revolution has only really just begun. Soybeans are used to make paints, insulation, adhesives, inks, foam for seat cushions, and biodiesel, of course.
Is there anything that soy cannot do? Perhaps not. Scientists at Agricultural Research Service (ARS), a scientific research agency of the USDA, are experimenting with the use of defatted soy flour, to take the place of traditional petroleum based fillers that increase tensile strength and wear in tires.
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According to an article on the ARS website, the filler typically used in modern tire production is called carbon black, which according to Wikipedia, is produced by “the incomplete combustion of heavy petroleum products like FCC tar, coal tar, [and] ethylene cracking tar.”
The research so far indicates that while the “storage modulus” (a measure of elasticity) scores for tires made with soy filler are about twenty times greater than those of tires without filler, petroleum based fillers still score somewhat better.
While we won’t be able to do away with tires anytime soon (oh, where are the hovercrafts, jetpacks, and flying cars?), perhaps the use of soy in this manner could help loosen our dependence on petroleum products, and increase our ability to recycle the tires that we do use.
Image Credit: Manky Maxblack at Flickr under a Creative Commons License
Sources: Agricultural Research Service via BioBasedNews.com, Wikipedia
Or cause more debate in the food vs fuel crowd. Soy is a major food stock as an additive as well as straight food source. I am all for petroleum replacements, but it has to be done in a way that does not affect our ability to feed ourselves.
One thing that is overlooked here is that the petroleum products used in tires would be simply WASTE material if not used this way.
While soy could be a good substitute for the petroleum when and if we are able to reduce the use of petroleum to the point that we need the soy substitute, using soy prematurely will simply increase the cost of the tires and require a new way to dispose of the replaced petroleum product.
Doug
A few years ago a lot of people in the international development community were lamenting the fact that the US and EU were dumping food in Africa at prices so low that African farmers were unable to compete. Today there are many African farmers who are moving up the economic scale from subsistence farming to growing food for the local markets. Improving agriculture in Africa is not only going to get African countries off of international charity and feed local populations with locally grown food, it offers the eventual possibility of also producing local biofuel and exporting biofuel surpluses to the US and Europe.