Plastic has been around for not longer than roughly 100 years, and the synthetic material is a brilliant invention. Its production is cheap, it can take almost any possible form, it is light-weight, versatile and, above all, inexpensive.
\nOriginal soundtrack Frank Thenhausen, Production Manager, Thenhausen Spritzgusstechnik + Werkzeugbau GmbH:
\n\u201cWe can no longer imagine a life without synthetics. We are affected by them in all areas. It starts with packaging, technical parts in car and plane manufacture. One would like to produce it more cheaply than in the past. This results in a price war because synthetics are very much in demand. The article itself is a thermo-synthetic. I can reduce its size, I can recycle it and make new synthetic parts from it, which is almost unlimitably possible.\u201c
\nChemically, plastic materials are synthetic, i.e. artificial, compounds on a carbon basis. The term \u201cplastic\u201d is derived from the Latin word for \u201cmalleable\u201d.
\nPlastics are also called synthetics because they do not occur in nature in their present form but are produced synthetically, however \u2013 as opposed to steel or glass \u2013 from organic substances.
\nThe parent substance of plastic is petroleum, a purely natural product, because petroleum does not consist of anything else than tiny sea dwellers, which, after their death, were being chemically transformed under pressure over the course of millions of years. These are resources that took millions of years to form and that are not unlimited.
\nIn refineries, the petroleum is separated into its various components, namely into small molecules, so-called monomers.
\nThe monomers can be combined in any possible way by chemical linking in so-called synthesis processes. Large chain-shaped or net-shaped molecules, the polymers or primary plastics, are formed from the multiple small molecules.
\nThe properties of primary plastics can be changed with colour particles or other chemical additives, e.g. softening or hardening agents.
\nDepending on the method applied and on the type of monomers used, different kinds of plastic are created.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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