Green rubber composites are one of the prime areas of sustainable elastomer research and hence, feature on top of our research program. Use of petroleum-based raw ingredients like carbon black, and micrometer-sized black particles from tire wear has drawn the attention of environmentalists over the last few decades.

Therefore, procurement of raw materials from the renewable resources is the need of hour. Lignin being a by-product of paper industries, could be a material of choice for the rubber composite development. Recently, we were able to show that mechanical performance of lignin-based rubber composites could be comparable with the performance of carbon black or silica-based rubber composites.

Last but not least, we are also working to replace some commonly used rubber curatives like zinc oxide (ZnO), diphenyl guanidine (DPG) etc. by suitable chemicals that are known to be non-toxic (LDH) or of natural origin (Sulphur based amino acid).