(From:CMB-CETA Editor)

On Oct. 26th, rubber experts from 20 countries including those from Japan, United States, China and Britain started a two-day meeting in Bogor on Monday, to discus common standards for rubber products for different industrial purposes including seismic rubber bearing.

It is hoped that through this conference there will be a lot of shared information to develop rubber industry and resulted in a standardized seismic tremor absorber, Gatot Irianto head of the Agricultural Research and Development of the Agricultural Department said.

According to the Chairman of the Medan Rubber Research Center Chaerul Anwar, the subject will be intensively discussed on the second day of the meeting. It will specifically cover the general assessment of the current situation, the challenges in applying the technology and the prospect of developing the technology.

Seismic rubber bearings have been widely used in Japan, China, Malaysia, Srilanka, India or the United States, but were still used only at several building in Indonesia despite evidence on the effectiveness of the technology.

Chaerul said the Indonesia Rubber Research Center have developed a type of the seismic bearings since 1990 which was installed at the office of the 8th State Plantation Company in Sukabumi, which survived the magnitude-7.3 earthquake in West Java on early September which killed at least 70 people.