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Asked by anon-230131 to Sarah, Isaac, Hira, Elena, Anisha, Alex on 11 Nov 2019.
Question: how do we make plastic
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Alex Leide answered on 11 Nov 2019:
Plastics start from natural oil which is separated for different uses. Some parts are burned for fuel, but some is used for chemical reactions. In the part used for making plastic, there are short chains of carbon and hydrogen atoms which can be “polymerised”. This is a reaction to make longer chains of atoms which are flexible, kind of like cooked spaghetti. When the chains grow longer, they get tangled up which makes a solid plastic. To make different shapes, you can heat the plastic which lets the “spaghetti” chains untangle a little bit so it becomes soft and it can be moulded into any shape you want. Once it cools, the chains become tangled and it is hard again. This is a basic way, but there are thousands of different types of plastic which are still being researched and developed
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Sarah Knight answered on 12 Nov 2019:
It definitely sounds like Alex is more of an expert on this than me! As someone who doesn’t know much about plastic, one of the things I find amazing about it is that it’s often made from petroleum — as Alex says, natural oil — and petroleum is a fossil fuel, which means it’s made from the bodies of lots of tiny dead organisms which have been crushed and made extremely hot. So plastic is often actually made from tiny animals: a pretty weird thought!
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