A Toast To A Greener Future

“Bend me, shape me, any way you want me.”

        Those are the words of an ancient love song, but it could just as easily be a song about plastics the most versatile substances in our modern world.

        Plastics are plastic, which means we can mould them into pretty much anything, from car bodies and washing-up containers to toothbrushes. 

That’s partly because there are many distinct kinds of plastic, but also because each kind can be utilized for many things. What exactly is plastic?  What is the history of plastic? How do we make it? How do we get rid of it when we no longer need it? 

What are Plastics: Chemistry?

The chemistry of plastics can be complicated, but the basics are straightforward. Think back to your high school science teachings about atoms and molecules. Plastics are simply chains of like molecules combined. 

These chains are called polymers. This is why many plastics start with “poly,” such as polyethene, polystyrene, and polypropylene. Polymers usually are made of carbon and hydrogen and sometimes oxygen, sulfur, nitrogen, fluorine, chlorine, phosphorus, or silicon.

What is the history of plastic?

Plastics: A Story of more than 100 Years of Innovation

Since the dawn of history, humankind has attempted to develop materials offering advantages not found in natural materials. The development of plastics began with the use of natural materials that had fundamental plastic properties, such as shellac and chewing gum. 

The next move in the evolution of plastics involved the chemical change of natural materials such as rubber, collagen, nitrocellulose, and gallate. Finally, the broad range of completely synthetic materials that we would see as modern plastics started to be developed around 100 years ago: 

• Polyvinyl chloride (PVC) was initially polymerised between 1838-1872.

• One of the earliest instances was invented by Alexander Parkes in 1855, who called his invention Parkesine. We know it now as celluloid.

• A key discovery came in 1907 when Belgian-American chemist Leo Baekeland invented Bakelite, the first authentic synthetic, mass-produced plastic.

How plastics are made?

The production of plastics starts with the distillation of crude oil in an oil refinery. Two main processes are used to create plastics – polymerisation and polycondensation and they both need specific catalysts. 

In a polymerisation reactor, monomers such as propylene and ethylene are linked mutually to form long polymer chains. Each polymer has its features, structure, and size depending on the different types of basic monomers used.

There are many different types of plastics, and they can be grouped into two main polymer families:

• Thermoplastics (which melt on heating and then harden over on cooling).
• Thermosets (which never melt once they have been moulded).

What attributes do plastics have?

Generally, plastics are flexible and easy to form in a variety of ways, easy to make in various shapes, sizes, and colours, electrically insulating, lightweight, waterproof and comparatively inexpensive. Some of them are intended to be very strong and durable (car bits and prosthetic body parts are examples), while others are meant to fall apart in the environment relatively quickly (biodegradable plastic bags, for example).

The properties of plastic can also be intentionally engineered.  Suppose we want plastics to be resistant to static electricity so they don’t pick up so much dirt, then we can use anti-static additives during the manufacturing process to obtain them slightly electrically conducting.

Where do we use plastics?

In the early 20th century, plastics were a novelty, there were only a handful of plastics and very few uses. Zoom the clock forward 100 years and it’s troublesome to find things that we don’t use plastics for. 

Given what we’ve just learned about the characteristics of plastics, it comes as no surprise to find them helping us out in building construction, packaging, clothing, transport, and in many other parts of everyday life.

In buildings, you’ll find plastics in things like secondary glazing, roofs, heat insulation, and soundproofing, and even in the paints, you slap on your walls. Plastics are protecting your electrical cables and carrying water and waste-water in and out of your home. 

Car fenders are presently mostly made of plastic and lightweight car and boat bodies are often made from composites such as fibreglass (glass-reinforced plastic), which are plastics mixed with other materials for combined strength. Some plastics are soft or hard as the condition suits them. 

An amazing plastic called D3O® has an extraordinary ability to absorb impacts, normally it’s light and squishy, but if you hit it very quickly, it hardens immediately and cushions the blow like energy-absorbing materials.

Plastics and Planet:

Maybe you imagine we struggle to live with plastics? Try imagining for a moment how we’d live without them. Plastic is pretty fantastic we simply need to be livelier and more sensible about how we make it, use it, and recycle it when we’re done.

Most plastics are synthetic, so they’re thoughtfully designed by chemists and laboriously engineered under very artificial conditions. They’d never directly appear in the natural world and they’re still a relatively new technology, so animals and other organisms haven’t had to grow so they can feed on them or break them down. Since a lot of the plastic items we use are intended to be low-cost and disposable, we generate an awful lot of plastic trash.

Put these two points together and you get problems like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a giant “lake” of floating plastic in the centre of the North Pacific Ocean made from things like waste plastic bottles. 

How can we solve terrible problems like this? One solution is better public enlightenment? If people are conscious of the problem, they might consider twice about littering the environment or maybe they’ll choose to buy things that use less plastic packaging. 

Another solution is to reuse more plastic, but that also requires better public education, and it offers practical problems too (the need to classify plastics so they can be reused effectively without contamination). A third solution is to increase bioplastics and biodegradable plastics that can tear down more quickly in the environment.

It’s easy to replace plastics as cheap and nasty materials that destroy the planet, but if you look around you, the entity is different. If you want cars, replacement body parts, toys, medical adhesives, water pipes, paints, computers, fibre-optic cables, and a million other things, you’ll need plastics as well.

What will be the future of Plastics?

Despite growing mistrust, plastics are hazardous to modern life. Plastics made tolerable the development of computers, cell phones, and most of the lifesaving approaches of modern medicine. 

Lightweight and good for insulation, plastics aid save fossil fuels used in heating and transportation. Possibly most important, inexpensive plastics increased the standard of living and made considerable abundance more readily available.

Without plastics, many properties that we take for granted might be out of reach for all but the richest countries. Replacing natural substances with plastic has created many of our possessions cheaper, lighter, safer, and stronger.

Since it’s obvious that plastics have a relevant place in our lives, some scientists are trying to make plastics safer and more sustainable. Some innovators are improving bioplastics, which are made from plant crops instead of fossil fuels, to create substances that are more environmentally friendly than traditional plastics. 

Others are working to make biodegradable plastics. Some innovators are exploring for ways to make recycling more efficient, and they even hope to perfect a process that transforms plastics back into the fossil fuels from which they were derived. 

All of these innovators understand that plastics are not perfect but that they are an essential and necessary part of our future.

Since Baekeland’s creation, many new plastics have been obtained and developed, giving a huge range of desirable properties, and you will encounter them in every home, office, factory, and vehicle. We can’t predict what lies in the market over the next hundred years, but we are sure in predicting that, for plastics, the sky’s the limit!