Sulfur vulcanization a substantial fraction of natural and synthetic rubber. Reclaimed rubber has altered properties and is unsuitable for use in many products, including tires. Tires and other vulcanized products are potentially amenable to devulcanization, but this technology has not produced material that can supplant unvulcanized materials. The main problem is that the carbon-sulfur linkages are not readily broken, without the input of costly reagents and heat. Thus, more than half of scrap rubber is simply burned for fuel. Although polymeric sulfur is unstable and decomposes back to its monomer, it is possible to create stable polymers consisting mostly of sulfur via
Sulfur dioxide Sulfur dioxide Sulfur dioxide (also sulphur dioxide in British English) is the chemical compound with the formula . It is a toxic gas with a burnt match smell. It is released naturally by volcanic activity and is produced as a by-product of the burning of fossil fuels contaminated with sulfur compounds and copper extraction. SO is a bent molecule with "C" symmetry point group. A valence bond theory approach considering just "s" and "p" orbitals would describe the bonding in terms of resonance between two resonance structures. The sulfur–oxygen bond has a bond order of 1.5. There is support for