History of Plastics

Durable but slow to degrade, plastic is used in producing so many products, from beverage bottles to water bottles to containers. Humans have been using naturally derived plastic for a very long time, as far back as before Christ.

The Olmecs in Mexico played with balls made of rubber – a natural polymer. It was not until the 18^th century that the first European, French explorer Charles-Marie de La Condamine, stumbled upon the rubber tree in the Amazon basin (Knight, 2014).

Only in the 1840s did the American Charles Goodyear and the British Thomas Hancock take out patents on either side of the Atlantic for ‘vulcanized’ rubber (rubber treated with sulphur for more durability). Thanks to vulcanization, the bicycle tyre was made out of rubber, followed by the motor car, and the Goodyear tyre company. The history of plastic goes as far back as when man started using wood. Why? Because half of an average piece of wood is made of cellulose (a polymer that provides plant cells their tough walls, and wood, durability and stiffness).

Alexander Parkes created the first man-made plastic and publicly demonstrated it at the 1862 Great International Exhibition in London (Lytle, 2015). Cellulose provided the raw material for this breakthrough. Parkesine was an organic material derived from cellulose, which once heated, could be molded, still retaining its shape upon cooling. He named the new material Parkesine after himself; Parkes.

In 1870 two Americans, the Hyatt brothers added camphor to Parkesine improving its malleability, and renamed the material, celluloid. The next most important material in the early history of plastics was formaldehyde. The demand for white chalkboards in German schools resulted in the discovery of casein plastics. Casein plastics were produced by reacting casein (milk protein) with formaldehyde. Casein is still being used by the button industry today. In 1899, Arthur Smith took out British Patent 16, 275, the first dealing with phenol-formaldehyde resins for use as an ebonite substitute in electrical insulation (History of Plastics, 2015). Phenol-formaldehyde was studied in the succeeding decade mainly for academic reasons.

Leo Hendrik Baekeland discovered techniques to control and modify the phenol-formaldehyde reaction, from which useful products could be produced, making phenolics the first fully synthetic resins to become commercially successful. This breakthrough in the development of plastics was achieved by the aforementioned Leo Hendrik Baekeland in 1907. The period 1930 – 1940 saw the initial commercial development of today’s major thermoplastics: polyvinyl chloride, low density polyethylene, polystyrene, and polymethyl methacrylate (History of Plastics, 2015).

The Resin Identification Code - a system of plastic coding, was developed in 1998 by the U.S.-based Society of the Plastics Industry to ease the recycling of post-consumer plastics. Nowadays, this code is used on most plastic products, imprinted on the product, often on the bottom.

References

History of Plastics. (2015). Retrieved May 21, 2015, from SPI - The Plastics Industry Trade Association: www.plasticsindustry.org

Knight, L. (2014, May 17). A Brief History of plastics, natural and synthetic. Retrieved May 16, 2015, from British Broadcasting Corporation - BBC: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-27442625

Lytle, C. L. (2015). When The Mermaids Cry: The Great Plastic Tide. Retriev