Natural rubber Natural Rubber - Solid state Natural rubber is made from a runny, milky white liquid called latex that oozes from certain plants when you cut into them. (Common dandelions, for example, produce latex; if you snap off their stems, you can see the latex dripping out from them. In theory, there's no reason why we couldn't make rubber by growing dandelions, though we'd need an awful lot of them. Although there are something like 200 plants in the world that produce latex, over 99 percent of the world's natural rubber is made from the latex that comes from a tree species called Hevea brasiliensis , widely known as the rubber tree . This latex is about one third water and one third rubber particles held in a form known as a colloidal suspension. Natural rubber is a polymer of isoprene (also known as 2-methylbuta-1,3-diene) with the chemical formula (C 5 H 8 )n. To put it more simply, it's made of many thousands of basic C 5 H 8 units (the mon
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