Circular rubber technologies

ASSESSING THE TRUE PRICE OF RUBBER

Client

Circular Rubber Technologies (CRT) is a rubber reclaim production company based in Canada. CRT aims to create a more circular and sustainable form of rubber production by reusing abandoned rubber from mining equipment.

Project description

Impact Institute worked together with CRT to assess and compare the True Price gap of 3 value chains: CRT’s reclaim, naturally produced rubber from latex farms in Thailand and synthetically produced rubber from crude oil in the USA. The study provides a comparative and a driver analysis of the value chains based on 9 environmental impacts and 9 social impacts.

Benefits to the client

The comparison of the value chains showed how reclaiming production improves impact, and the driver analysis additionally provided clear insights into the impact creation of CRT’s processes. Recommendations were provided on how processes can be adjusted over time to reduce the impact created.​​

To perform the True Price analyses, a mixture of primary (from CRT) and secondary data was explored. The social impacts of the natural and synthetic value chain were accessed through the Global Impact Database (GID). The GID uses sector-country impact data and provides a reliable estimation of social impacts. Data include child labour, forced labour, gender wage gap, underpayment, and workplace health & safety incidents.

The GID allows for a quick indication of the impact of activity by quantitatively describing the global economy, estimating the economic, social, and environmental impacts of invest-ments for 140 countries with 65 sectors, making a total of 9100 country sector combinations.