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 18th 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
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.
Works Cited
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. Retrieved April 15, 2015, from
Plastic Pollution: http://plastic-pollution.org/
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