Plastic

The first plastic was invented by Alexander Parkes, who demonstrated it in 1862, at the Great International Exhibition in London. The material is an organic material derived from cellulose that once heated could be molded, and retained its shape when cooled. That material called Parkesine. Cellulose is created from nitrocellulose and camphor. Around 1897, in US, Leo Hendrick Baekeland invented a new synthetic resin called Bakelite. Bakelite was the first thermo setting resin to be developed and was obtained by the reaction of phenol and formaldehyde. It is hard, resistant to heat and electricity, and cant be easily melted or scorched when it has already cooled. Bakelite obscured the first material, parkesine. In 1936, over 90,000 tons of Bakelite was produced yearly all over the world and in 1944, Bakeli tes production had risen to 175,000 tons. Bakelite often called phenolic resins. In the 1930s, Wallace Carruthers invented a plastic polymer made from the condensation of adipic acid and a certain type of diaminohexane monomers. It could be drawn out into strong fibers, like silk. This plastic is called nylon. Nylon is light, strong and durable. It became the basis of many types of clothing, tents, luggage, bags, ropes, etc. The use of nylon led to the creation of many other plastics, like Dacron, Styrofoam, polystyrene, polyethylene and vinyl. Each of them has different shapes, even though the material is just the same. I chose plastic to be my presentation material because we use plastic every day and it had helped us to do things easier for hundred years. Many people said that life without plastic is incomprehensible, but right now, some of them had made our world suffered because they are hard to rot and the quantity of them that we use every day is really big. We can recycle some of it, but until now on, no one had ever found a way to recycle Styrofoam. So now, I am here to remind you to use plastic as little as possible, so that together, we can decrease the pollution around us.

Bakelite telephone

Dacron

Alexander Parkes and John Wesley Hyatt

Polystyrene

Plastic Bottles

Plastic Styrofoam

Polyethylene