It may have taken three planes, a bouncy bus ride and about 18 hours of travel time to get to Itubera, Brazil, but it took only about two minutes of staring into the mouth of a thundering waterfall at Michelin's rubber plantation in the Atlantic rain forest to realize that this place was much more than a rubber factory.
Set in the middle of a largely unknown jungle, one that happens to produce lots of rubber trees, the waterfall is the centrepiece of Michelin's Biodiversity Research Centre in this remote Brazilian area about 200 kilometres south of Salvador, near the Atlantic coast.
When the waterfall wasn't drowning out conversations, its misty fog soon soaked visitors who ventured out on a narrow observation dock to witness its power close up.
The falls marked the spot where, in late 2003, Michelin went from being a rubber producer in the Bahia province, to a community builder of the area, one of the poorest in Brazil. That's when Michelin embarked on its Ouro Verde co-operative, literally "green gold," a project that encompassed developing new low-cost housing and medical facilities for the plantation's workers and families, furthering advanced research into a unique type of rubber tree "cancer" that is globally feared outside its native South America, and promoting scientific study of the Atlantic rain forest, the virtually unknown southern neighbour of the famed Amazon rain forest.
Three-thousand hectares of the Atlantic rain forest is a natural reserve that Michelin has protected with security forces from poachers, and opened up to study by scientists from all over the world. It promises new discoveries of plant life and even small mammals, as well as its own local ecological research efforts.
The plantation also is organizing some leading-edge social development efforts for both Michelin employees and others contracted to local rubber producers, many of whom are now partners with Michelin, which supports them with loan guarantees and tree-farming research.
If that "green gold" project name has the cynic in you assuming that it was simply Michelin's way of making more money in the area, think again. "By 2001, there were so many dead trees in this region, it caused Michelin to question whether the project was sustainable," said Gerard Bockiau, the director of Michelin's Brazilian plantations.
At the time, and to this day, the rubber trees in the Amazon and Atlantic rainforests were being hard hit by a plant disease called microcyclus ulei, or South American leaf blight, which not only killed many trees, but also made the remaining rubber trees much less efficient, producing about half the latex per tree of that which Asian rubber trees produce.
So even with numerous advances in disease resistance, it would still have been considerably less expensive to shelve the project and get on with more efficient sites elsewhere in the world.
"The first and most obvious solution would have been to sell it all," Bockiau said. "But selling it wouldn't guarantee the preservation of this part of the rain forest, and simply wouldn't be the Edouard Michelin way," citing the former Michelin co-chairman, who died in 2006 in a boating accident at the age of 42, but whose legacy remains as a social and environmental leader in an industry often maligned for its environmental practices.
The project also serves as a template for various Michelin projects in developing nations around the world, including in Africa and Asia, where more than 90 per cent of the world's rubber is produced. It's in nations such as China, Malaysia, and Indonesia, as well as parts of Africa, where the great fear is that this fungus will spread to those hevea (rubber) trees, which would spell major upheaval for Michelin, the rubber and tire industry as a whole, and the global economy, environmental experts say.
