Why the Confusion about "Styrofoam"?

Factual Questions
41

Right. But to a non-engineer, non-sciencey, non-bothered by details person, they’re close enough, especially given the lack of a better option. If you can’t explain the difference without going into production methods, it’s a good bet most people won’t recognize the distinction on their own.

This box spacer, these packing peanuts, these whatever they ares, all of those containers, these floral favorites, these cake models, and this mock-up airplane may all, in reality, be made from different stuff. But to the layperson, it’s all soft yet rigid lightweight meringue looking stuff made solid. The only catchy word we know for it is Styrofoam, and like a toddler who calls all four legged creatures “doggie”, we over-generalize.

Why did it happen the first time? I doubt there was a first time. It’s such a common human linguistic habit, I’m betting it happened simultaneously and frequently as new products came out without labeling their materials with catchy names on the front of the package in 2 inch letters. Label something

Expanded Polystyrene
FOAM FLORAL FORMS
Assorted Sizes

and it’s easy to see why people just call them styrofoam. I mean, half the word is there, right, the “foam” part. And “foam” is either transitory bubbles or it’s styrofoam, in most people’s minds.

Sheee-it, even the first link has Expanded Polystyrene suppliers as its first link! Yet I found all those images on one Google image search for, you guessed it, styrofoam.

Trademarked or not, the word is still subject to the evolving language rule - language is evolving, and when you can say a word and be understood, that’s what the word means. I don’t think there was ever a time when a Expanded Polystyrene bead cup wasn’t called a styrofoam cup outside of the DOW factory, no matter how much DOW wants to pout about it.

42

But, as I keep saying, your non-science-savvy person wouldn’t come up with “styrofoam”. There WAS a first time, because someone in the know misapplied the term. I don’t know of laypeople goinmg asround miscalling plastic “acetonitrile” because it is used in the same applications. People only use terms they;'ve heard before. If layfolk came up with it, they’d just have alled it “foam”, or something unrelasted. They wouldn’t have calledf it “styrofoam”.

43

Actually, now that I think about it. Perhaps the common usage of “styrofoam” has more to do with someone else’s collosal marketing failure.

Example:

Say I bought a boat made of fibre-glass with the non-catchy trademark FibrationGlassusPlasticiumSTX. The boat manufacturer, BoatsRUs, developed this material specifically for boats. They are so wrapped up in their nautical product line, they never think to market the material as a brand. Sales people push the boats as being made from this “new, high-tech, space-age material”. BoatsRUs boats are the best boats ever!

I realize the boat is made of some kind of plastic-like material, new to my experience, that seems to have a grain like wood, but it’s really light. Neat. In my mind, I inadequately call the unnamed material “the stuff new BoatsRUs boats are made of”. It doesn’t really have an easily identifying name to me.

Meanwhile, BoatsRUs is happy that they are known as the big shit of boat manufacturers.

Next, I buy a carbon-fibre bike and this new material is trademarked CarbFi. They really sell it to me, telling me how light it is, yet strong, so cool. They extoll the virtues of CarbFi. A bike is a bike, but THIS bike is made out of CarbFi, and that’s what makes it special! CarbFi: the newest, coolest, rockin’ material.

“Oh,” says I, “that’s what my boat must be made of. Some kind of inferior, less-developed CarbFi.” Finally I know the name of the stuff my BoatsRUs boat is made from! (Or so I think because it’s seems close enough to me.)

By the time BoatsRUs realizes their folly and FibrationGlassusPlasticiumSTX is now being used for all sorts of different applications, it’s too late. CarbFi has already entered into the collective consciousness as the name of that “new, high-tech, light-weight material”. They are doomed to be known as “long-named lesser-grade CarbFi” even though they are a totally different product.

Meanwhile, the good folks at CarbFi are whizzed that some people think that “fibre glass” is a low-grade CarbFi, when it’s a completely different, not-as-cool material.

So perhaps the company that patented “foam cup” material, pushed their product line and not their material brand. Then Styrofoam came along and gave us a plausbile name for it. You know, that stuff never had a name before, and “styrofoam” is close enough.

44

What straining at gnats.

Coffee cups are made of polystyrene foam; Dow insulation and crafts are made of polystyrene foam. Though they are produced differently, they are manifestly the same damn stuff. It was obvious to me as a child, it’s obvious to me now: coffee cups, angel heads, coolers, and packing peanuts are all made from the same stuff. The differences are minor, and do not change the essential nature of the stuff. The most elegant contraction of polystyrene foam is STYROFOAM, regardless of whether it’s expanded, extruded, or molded.

45

What is more likely?

A) Dow made cups and other products out of Expanded Polystyrene Beads and labeled them Styrofoam, and now denies they ever existed, and nobody can actually provide evidence of a Dow Styrofoam brand cup.

B) People saw Styrofoam, a white puffy plastic foam, used in WW2 and marketed heavily by Dow, and applied the same name to ESB, a white puffy polystyrene foam, with somewhat different properties, that is not sold by Dow.

46

Someone with better resources than me should figure out who invented the ‘styrofoam’ coffee cup. (My prediction: Dow Chemical or maybe a subsidiary.) I tried the USPTO patent database, but that’s only fully searchable to 1972. ‘Styrofoam’ as a trademark was registered in 1950, and the term was in use even earlier than that.

47

Not necessarily. The usage might have come from the lips of an actor doing a war era newsreel on the wonders of plastics.

48

And why are those the only two options? You’ve no more evidence or even hint of it that your scenarion #2 ever happened, and I’m not seeing it as a likely one. There are scores of other possibilities.

49

So now I’ll have to call my eye color “azure”? :smiley:

50

Those options are your answer and my answer. Your answer requires Dow to have marketed a product, have that product be the basis for widespread incorrect usage of the term Styrofoam, then deny the products existance and have nobody, anywhere, able to prove them wrong.

My answer requires that people take the snappy trademarked name of a white puffy polystyrene foam popularized during WW2 and use that name for another white puffy polystyrene foam used in household products.

You’re right, my answer is entirely ridiculous, who could believe such a thing?

51

“my answer” isn’t what I think happened c-- it’s one [possibility. As is yours. But they’re not the only ones, and you clearly don’t know asny better than I do. I’m asking how this state of asffairs came about.
But that people latched onto the term for the lifeboat stuff to apply to the cup material which purely by chance has the same basic chemical formula seems to me to be stretching the bounds of probability a bit. I suspect more direct causation.

52

The most elegant contraction is even simpler: foam cup. Two syllables instead of four.

53

Let’s reread the tradmark registration:

In other words, the color blue is part of the trademark design, not the word blue.

54

You work for Dow, don’t you?

55

No, Dow also has a separate trademark on the word Blue as applied to “Building insulation used in commercial and residential construction”.

56

I wonder if Owens Corning has one for pink?

57

I’m in the “retroactive bullshit from Dow” camp.

On their What is Styrofoam page, they describe other items thusly:

Yeah, that’s why we use this other material for coffee cups, because it doesn’t insulate and isn’t moisture resistant. :rolleyes:

58

Leave a cup of coffee in a foam cup, and in a few days the cup will dissolve and leak the coffee out.

59

This is actually somewhat better performance than expected for a coffee filled house. Even the styrofoam insulated variety will leak before you can top off the first story.

60

Doesn’t look like it. They have one for PROPINK insulating sheathing, though.