I’ve just been exposed to natural rubber and I wasn’t expecting it to be that sticky and smelly.
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Useable rubber is a polymer – a bunch of very long string-like molecules, made up of repeating units. For rubber, this unit is 1,4-polyisoprene.
The sap of a rubber tree, called latex, contains 1,4-polyisoprene floating around in water and oils, along with a lot of other junk. By adding acid to the sap, we can make the 1,4-polyisoprene form longer and longer chains and come out of the sap, leaving all that unwanted stuff behind (particularly after repeated chemical cleaning).
Most rubber is then vulcanized – heat-treated with sulfur to create more bonds between the polymer strands, using bits of sulfur as connecting blocks. This makes it more durable, more flexible, and less susceptible to getting broken down by sunlight and oxygen.
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