Professor Alex Routh gave a fascinating seminar this week on the production process of rubber gloves.
It’s a subject that not many of us think about, but the scale and significance of rubber glove manufacture is enormous. 300 billion latex gloves are produced globally every year, and the process is far from environmentally friendly or sustainable.
One part of the production process involves compounding Zinc into the latex to give the gloves strength, and in this talk Alex focused on the promising possibility of replacing Zinc with Calcium.
Alex, alongside Bob Groves, has been investigating rubber gloves for over a decade. During the seminar, Alex introduced the audience to various other important considerations surrounding the process. For instance, the high energy cost required to evaporate huge amounts of water and the fact that latex gloves are predominantly produced with synthetic polymers from oil rather than from natural latex due to worries surrounding allergenic proteins.