Discover The Making Of Plastic
What is common between laptop computer bags, hair loss products, skin care treatment bottles? It is Plastic. Plastic comes from petroleum. The petroleum is drilled and taken to the refinery. Here crude oil is refined into natural gas, grease, wax, kerosene, petrol, ethane, butane, propane, naphthalene, tar and many other such products.
Then propylene and ethylene are made by cracking ethane and propane at 3000 degrees centigrade. Propylene and ethylene are mixed with a catalyst to make fluff which is a powder like substance which looks like detergent. Other additives are put into the fluff and blended consistently. The polymer thus formed is then molten by feeding into an extruder.
This molten plastic is then fed into a pelletizer which makes it into little pellets. The pellets are the final product sold to the customers as virgin plastic. The pellets are then moulded into desired shaped by the process of blowing, extrusion and injection by the customers themselves. As plastics are used everywhere and all aspects of our lives they are called the innovation of the 20th century.
As plastic is used because it is so flexible, mouldable into any desired shapes like packets and bottles, as it does not rot, rust or break and is light it is reduces transportation cost. Plastic is used because it is it is believed that it saves an ecosystem from destruction, sand comes from the intertidal zones of the beaches which are rich in its flora and fauna.
The trees cut to make cartons and paper is saved. Inventors are working all over the world to make great gadgets like a television on a plastic sheet which folds away to make more space. Why is the use of plastics banned from various places even though it is a wonder material?
After domestic sewage and industrial waste, plastic is the most toxic anthropogenic pollutant. It remains in the environment for more than 700 years as there are decomposers to degrade it and is highly toxic.
Right from its production to its disposal plastic is a threat to the environment and there is no safe way to deal with it. At present the only way to deal with this menace is to decrease its production and ban it. The other way is to engineer a bacterium which feeds on plastic like the once we use in dissolving oil-slicks. Hopefully these are reasons enough to avoid plastics?
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