Rubber industry Energy use

Excessive use of energy is usually associated with many industrial plants worldwide, and rubber plants (11.8%). The total consumption of the three industries constitutes 88.6 % of the overall domestic consumption of natural rubber. The rapid growth of these has enabled Malaysia to become the world’s largest consumer of natural rubber latex [1,2]. There are currently 126 companies in the tyre and tyre-related products sub-sector of which nine are tyre producers; the remain-ing companies produce retreads, tyre treads for retreading, valves and other accessories. The industrial and general rubber products and downstream rubber industries [2]. Rubber goods are produced with a large variety of articles mainly small and medium sized enterprises, but also large tyre manufacturers. Production plants for tyres or general rubber prod-ucts comprise production lines of 800–1200 m in length, and are usually spread out in different buildings. The main processing steps for rubber products are: mastication, mixing (mills, internal mixers, cooling mills), further processing (pre-warming, processing in extruders, processing on calendars), and vulcanization. Energy is needed for all the steps in rubber product processing and it represents the highest cost for the use of some of th