What is plastic made of?

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With various products you will often be told that they are made of plastic. This is followed by the question of what this material is made of.

That is what we mean by plastic

Plastic is a rather colloquial term for everyone Plastics. The term comes from the fact that plastics were usually thermoformable. The terms plastic or plastic are often used to refer to any man-made material, so it's hard to say what plastic is.

  • The transition from natural material to artificial is fluid. The property of a material to be malleable, which led to the name plastic, is not limited to plastics, just think of rubber or tree resins.
  • Originally, such natural materials were used to make plastic. This is how natural rubber became rubber, but it was never referred to as plastic. Synthetic rubber (Buna) was never called that either.
  • Invented in 1885, galalith is made up of casein and formaldehyde. It was also called an artificial horn. Galalith, which is rarely used today, is a type of plastic that is not based on petroleum.
  • Celluloid, which is made from cellulose nitrate and camphor, is considered to be the first thermoplastic plastic, i.e. plastic that can be deformed by heat. So plastic can be celluloid.
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  • A very old material known as plastic is also Bakelite, which was made from phenols and formaldehyde. It is a thermosetting plastic that can no longer be deformed after it has hardened.
  • Usually these old plastics are called plastic. If something is made of plastic, you can count on galalith, celluloid or bakelite, but it can also be a modern plastic.
  • Modern plastics are more precisely designated with the more precise names polyethylene (PE), polypropylene (PP), polyvinyl chloride (PVC), polystyrene (PS), polyurethane (PU) or polyethylene terephthalate. Sometimes you will come across trade names such as Diolen, Hostalen or Acryl.

What plastic is made of

Most plastics are based on hydrocarbon compounds, mostly alkanes, alkenes or alkynes. The base material is found in petroleum.

  • Polyethylene is a series of ethene CH2= CH2. The double bond is broken and further ethenes are attached to the bonds that are thus released. The process is called polymerization. So this type of plastic is made of carbon and hydrogen. Polypropylene is made by polymerizing propene. This plastic also consists only of carbon and hydrogen. Polystyrene also consists only of carbon and hydrogen, it just has a different structural formula.
  • Polyvinyl chloride is polymerized from vinyl chloride (H.2C = CHCl). This plastic also contains chlorine. Polyurethanes are created through reactions of dialcohols or polyols. They always contain a urethane group (-NH-CO-O-). So it also contains nitrogen.
  • Although plastic usually consists only of carbon and hydrogen, it can have very different properties, including in terms of environmental compatibility. In the case of carbon compounds, the length of the chains and the shape of the molecule are important.

If you want to know exactly what something is made of, you cannot be satisfied with the explanation “plastic”.

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