International tyre manufacturer Continental is moving forward with its long-term plans to build its Taraxagum Lab Anklamas it received broad support from the Anklam town council.
Burkhardt Köller, Chairman of the Management Board of Continental Reifen Deutschland GmbH said the company’s next steps are to acquire the approximately 30,000-sq m plot of land located in the Lilienthalring business park, obtain building permit from the town of Anklam, and erect the first building. He said Continental will be implementing the said steps one at a time.
Köller also added that the company will invest EUR35 million over the next five years, as announced in August 2016, to further explore the rubber production processes, which they’ve only established on a laboratory scale to date, for transforming them onto an industrial scale, moving from grams to kilos to tonnes.
“We are planning to gradually increase the number of employees at the Taraxagum Lab site in Anklam to more than 20 by 2021,” added Dr. Andreas Topp, who is in charge of material and process development and industrialisation for tyres at Continental.
Continental also intends to enlarge the acreage in the region from the current 15 hectares to 800 hectares to increase crop yields to a level measured in tonnes, Dr. Topp added.
In the past few years, Continental and its project partners, the Fraunhofer Institute for Molecular Biology and Applied Ecology IME, branch office in Münster, the Julius Kühn-Institute in Quedlinburg, and the plant breeder ESKUSA, headquartered in Parkstätten, have already received three awards for the Taraxagum project.
As these awards demonstrate, external experts too consider the industrialisation of natural rubber from dandelion roots a highly promising venture. On behalf of the partners in the Taraxagum project, Continental recently received the 2016 Innovation Award presented by the international trade fair Automechanika. In 2015 Continental and the Fraunhofer Institute for Molecular Biology and Applied Ecology IME had already received the prestigious Joseph von Fraunhofer prize, and in 2014 the project won the GreenTec Award.