Baby Steps

The U.S. took two baby steps last week toward self-sufficiency in rubber:

> In a Connecticut apple orchard at the foot of Naugatuck's Elm Street, ground was broken for U.S. Rubber Co.'s new $2,750,000 synthetic rubber plant. This is the first of four plants planned by Defense Plant Corp., which handles the financing, leaves the management to the companies. The other plants will be run by Goodyear, Goodrich, Firestone. The U.S. Rubber plant when completed in about a year will have an annual capacity of 10,000 long tons--a little more than 1% of the 800,000 tons that the U.S. now consumes annually.

> Export-Import Bank has loaned $5,000,000 to raise rubber trees in Haiti. By last week the project had a 400-acre experimental station, plans under way for planting 7,500 more. In seven to nine years the Haiti program will produce 15-20,000 tons of rubber--about 2% of U.S. requirements. Four large U.S. companies have plans under way for rubber plantations in other parts of the Western Hemisphere.

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