The project "Establishment of carbon-cycle-system with natural rubber" was implemented by HUST, under the administration of Ministry of Education and Training, for the duration from April 2011 to March 2016 with total grant of nearly USD7 million.

Within the framework of the project, a group of Vietnamese and Japanese researchers have successfully developed remarkable technologies to reduce protein in natural rubber, which can cause skin allergy, in order to produce high-performance materials and alleviate environmentally negative impacts from natural rubber processing.

The overall goals of the project are to reduce CO2 emissions by replacing fossil-fuel-derived synthetic rubber with natural rubber, and to create a new generation industry in automobile, machinery or fuel industry with applications of high-performance rubber and advanced polymers from protein-free natural rubber.

The newly-developed technology by Japanese and Vietnamese researchers is expected to increase the safety of rubber products and promote the use of natural rubber to replace synthetic rubber.

It has also successfully developed advanced wastewater treatment technology for rubber processing factories, which actively contributed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions and recovering methane gas as an energy source. The researchers have also successfully developed enzymes to decompose cellulosic biomass with rubber to produce sugar and alcohol.Managed by a Board of Directors including Dr. Phan Trung Nghia and Japanese Co-Director, Assoc. Prof. Dr. Seiichi Kawahara, Nagaoka University of Technology (Japan), the Center will further develop the technology and equipment of the project.

All equipment provided by JICA such as nuclear magnetic resonance machine (NMR), infra-red spectrometer FT-IR, DMA density meter, gel permeation chromatography (GPC), and rubber hydraulic testing machines of rubber… were transferred entirely to the Center./.

( VNF )