I was playing a game of beer pong with friends over the weekend, and when one of the plastic ping-pongs became dented, one of my friends plied his lighter to it insisting that it would help it reform. It actually just melted a bit of it. From working in restaurants I learned to keep plastic and heat apart at all costs and about how toxic is gets when you catalyze it but also that its not automatically toxic on exposure to heat, so I held out on the hope he had kept the flame far enough away and stayed in the game. Sadly, when the ball made it back to my side of the table, the dented area had a brand new cowlick of melted material. According to a Wired article about this technique, most of these balls are made from nitrocellulose. Is this material hazardous or contaminating under these conditions? There wasn’t any smoke or smell which I noticed, but I did wind up handling the ball shortly after it was melted so I’m kind of concerned about what I might have been exposed too.
Are you sure that ping pong balls are made from nitrocellulose? Because I’ve only read* that billard balls were made from it before discovering film, but wiki warns
(Bolding mine)
So if the plastic melted instead of burning or exploding, it probably wasn’t nitrocellulose. Wiki says that ping pong balls are made from celluloid … ah, which is a compound from nitrocellulose and camphor to reduce flammability.
I don’t know about the actual side effects of melted ping pong balls (and I doubt there are many studies done into that), but how much alcohol is ingested during beer pong? That will have detrimental health effects without heat and surely.
- in one of the annotations for Discworld, where the Guild of alchemists keeps blowing things up before discovering film
Burnt nitrocellulose is not going to produce anything significantly toxic. Burning some other plastics might produce toxic fumes which could be harmful if you breathed in a significant amount of them, but even then, a little bit of burnt plastic being dunked in your beer is very unlikely to poison the beer.
Well, at least you aren’t dealing with the liquid in the center of a golf ball.
In the future, boil a small pot of water and put the ping pong ball in that. It will remove the dent and not risk burning/melting the ball.
I think nitrocellouse has largely been replaced with cellouse acetate buterate. At best you will get CO off burning it and maybe some other things too. I would avoid breathing the fumes from any burning plastic.
:(* 'Cause ping-pong balls are commonly used in amateur pyrotechnics and home built model rocketry to make nitrocellulose lacquer.
CMC fnord!
*Unless ya can still dissolve cellouse acetate buterate in a commonly available solvent for the same uses?
Yea, somebody got really confused. Heat will revive the ball but putting a flame to it will usually produce an impressive conflagration. Throw the ball in a pot of boiling water then put it back into play. No flames.
Yes CAB dissolves in the same esters, ketones, and aromatics as nitrocellulose. It burns fairly well too, but I don’t think it is used in munitions.
In the late 60’s I worked for the Rinshed Mason paint company in Detroit. They bought nitrocellulose in drums. For safety, it came wet down with isopropanol. They stored it over next to the labs to protect the factory if it ever caught fire.