What’s plastic made from? My SO says it has something to do with electicity, but I say it’s made from wood celluliod.
Are either of us right?
Many(probably most) plastics are based on chemicals derived from mineral oil.
Plastics are olymers – long chain molecules made of repeating units (called mers, so many of them together are [i[poly-mers*, get it?)These can com from a variety of sources – latex and celuloid come directl from plant material. A huge number of polymers come from oil or oil erivatives – conceptually the simplest is polyethylene, in which two carbons are joined by a double bond, with the remaining crbon bonds being attached to hydrogen. When these mers polymerize, the double bond “breaks” and the free end attaches to another ethylene molecule with such a broken bond, and so on and so on, until you have a “bacbone” of carbon atoms attached by single bonds that can be tens or hundred of thousands of “mers” long, or even longer. The polymer strands are like long strings of spahghetti, and are held together by Van der Waals forces, srta like spaghetti with static cling. When you melt a plastic of this sort you don’t break the long polymer chains, just the forces holding the strands together.
There are polymers made of mers containing silicon and oxygen (silicone) , and others in which the hydrogen atoms are replaced by Fluorine or Chlorine (as in Teflon = poly tetrafluoroethylene). Formaldehyde can be polymerized, yielding paaformaldehyde, a waxy solid that they used to ue as the basis for solid air fresheners (it would spontaneously “unzip” – depolymerize – and release formaldehyde and whatever perfume they mixed in). In the 1950s they discovered how to make the paraformaldehyde chains longer and stabilize the ends so it wou;ldn’t come apart, and so invented Dlrin.
Then there’s cross-linking, and block polymers, and co-polymerizatoion, and nylon, and … Uhh, find a good book on it.
Wow…It’s a hell of a lot more complicated than I thought it was going to be…No wonder cavemen didn’t have plastic utensils…
This was a little un-nerving to me. Ya’ll don’t know that plastic is made of oil???
Then I asked my son and his friend, playing Halo here in the next room.
Son: Chemicals?
Friend: Carpet?
:smack:
I don’t know specifically what you mean by oils, but plastics are not mostly made from things that I would consider oils. Polystyrene (packing foam) is made from a molecule more similar to benzene than an oil. Ethylene is a gas.
What happens, is when these things polymerize, they form long chains of hydrocarbons. Oils are also long chains of hydrocarbons so they have some similar characteristics.
For comparison, your typical oil may have a length of 18 carbon atoms. A polymer can have chain lengths from 200 to 100,000 carbons long. These chains can branch and cross link with other chains depending on the properties you want that polymer to have.
Often, chemicals which are not in the large chain of hydrocarbons are used to enhance the flexibility of the polymer. These molecules are usually quite oily, and this may also enhance the oily feel of a polymer.
Most of these compounds may actually come from crude oil somehow or another, so in that sense plastics are made from oils.
Chemicals was probably the best answer you can expect without a course in chemistry.
Yes but aren’t most plastics made from chemicals produced by distilling crude oil?
Call them petrochemicals. Everyone happy now?
Hydrogen and carbon, basically. You can get these from many sources, including crude oil, mineral oil, corn oil, pig shit, cow shit, human shit, shit shit, and shit oil.
That was pretty good, cdhostage 
Guys don’t forger Chlorine (PVC, …) or Fluorine (Teflon) - while talking plastics. The chlor alkali industry is one of the nastiest.
As CalMeacham said, nearly all plastics are derived from oil, even if they contain halogens. And yes - styrene, ethylene, vinyl, adipic acid, bisphenol are all derived from the petrochemcial industry (ie oil)
btw so are many pharmacuticals (aka drugs). So oil is a wonderous and precious resource.