Energy & Green Tech
Plastics are incredible materials with properties invaluable to the functioning of our modern world. They are strong, flexible, versatile, long-lasting and inexpensive. In particular, high-density polyethylene (HDPE) is ubiquitous ...
Mar 14, 2023
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7
Energy & Green Tech
Disposable plastics are everywhere: Food containers, coffee cups, plastic bags. Some of these plastics, called compostable plastics, can be engineered to biodegrade under controlled conditions. However, they often look identical ...
Mar 14, 2023
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44
Robotics
Robots are all around us, from drones filming videos in the sky to serving food in restaurants and diffusing bombs in emergencies. Slowly but surely, robots are improving the quality of human life by augmenting our abilities, ...
Mar 8, 2023
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70
Energy & Green Tech
Plastic is everywhere. Our society cannot do without it: plastics have numerous advantages, are extremely versatile, and are also cost effective. Today, plastics are mainly produced from crude oil. When the products reach ...
Mar 6, 2023
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38
Energy & Green Tech
There's a lot of potentially useful raw materials bound up in used face masks, grocery bags and food wrap. But it has been much cheaper to keep making more of these single-use plastics than to recover and recycle them.
Feb 23, 2023
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30
Energy & Green Tech
In recent years, environmental problems caused by global warming have become more apparent due to greenhouse gases such as CO2. In natural photosynthesis, CO2 is not reduced directly, but is bound to organic compounds that ...
Jan 25, 2023
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5
Consumer & Gadgets
In the effort to reduce plastic waste in the restaurant industry—single-use takeout containers, specifically—University of Michigan researchers compared the lifetime environmental impacts of single-use and reusable food ...
Jan 24, 2023
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5
Engineering
It happens far too often: you plug your laptop in and walk away only to return hours or days later to find it has lost some of its charge despite sitting idle and unused.
Jan 17, 2023
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524
Energy & Green Tech
Researchers have developed a system that can transform plastic waste and greenhouse gases into sustainable fuels and other valuable products—using just the energy from the sun.
Jan 9, 2023
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137
Energy & Green Tech
University of California, Riverside, scientists have moved a step closer to finding a use for the hundreds of millions of tons of plastic waste produced every year that often winds up clogging streams and rivers and polluting ...
Jan 6, 2023
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61
A plastic material is any of a wide range of synthetic or semi-synthetic organic solids used in the manufacture of industrial products. Plastics are typically polymers of high molecular mass, and may contain other substances to improve performance and/or reduce production costs. Monomers of plastic are either natural or synthetic organic compounds.
The word plastic is derived from the Greek πλαστικός (plastikos) meaning capable of being shaped or molded, from πλαστός (plastos) meaning molded. It refers to their malleability, or plasticity during manufacture, that allows them to be cast, pressed, or extruded into a variety of shapes—such as films, fibers, plates, tubes, bottles, boxes, and much more.
The common word plastic should not be confused with the technical adjective plastic, which is applied to any material which undergoes a permanent change of shape (plastic deformation) when strained beyond a certain point. Aluminum which is stamped or forged, for instance, exhibits plasticity in this sense, but is not plastic in the common sense; in contrast, in their finished forms, some plastics will break before deforming and therefore are not plastic in the technical sense.
There are two types of plastics: thermoplastics and thermosetting polymers. Thermoplastics are the plastics that do not undergo chemical change in their composition when heated and can be moulded again and again; examples are polyethylene, polypropylene, polystyrene, polyvinyl chloride and polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE). Thermosets can melt and take shape once; after they have solidified, they stay solid.
The raw materials needed to make most plastics come from petroleum and natural gas.
This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA
