Rubber trees are amazing because they produce a milky white liquid called latex that oozes out whenever the bark gets a scratch or cut. Workers called rubber tappers wake up very early in the morning to make a thin, slanted cut in the bark, and the latex slowly drips out into a little cup tied to the tree, kind of like how maple syrup is collected! The tree heals its own cut and grows new bark, so tappers can come back and make another cut the very next day. Rubber trees originally came from the rainforests of South America, but today most of them grow in Southeast Asia in countries like Thailand and Indonesia.
The milky latex is collected and mixed with special ingredients to make it stretchy and strong. Then it is used to make all sorts of amazing rubber things, like bouncy balls, car tires, rain boots, rubber ducks, balloons, and even the erasers on your pencils! One rubber tree can produce latex for about 30 years, and a single tree makes enough latex each year to build about 40 car tires. Before people knew about rubber trees, there was no such thing as rubber bands or rubber balls. Ancient people in Central America were the first to figure out how to use this stretchy, bouncy material over 3,000 years ago!
