Plastic has become a ubiquitous part of our daily life. The ceiling fan on your head, the glasses you wear, almost everything is made of plastic. Even the mobile phone you are playing with, 40% of the material is plastic.
Plastic is an important part of the world economy. If the foundation of the modern world is made of plastic bricks, it is not too much.
Why is plastic so popular? It has many better properties than traditional materials:
1. Low cost;
2. In many cases, it can be reused;
3. It has strong plasticity and can be made into products with various properties;
4. Compared with other materials, their toxicity is relatively small;
5. Durable, resistant to chemical and physical degradation.
In addition, plastics are closely related to the coal and petroleum industries. The low price and popularity of these industries give plastics an additional advantage.
Most importantly, at present, there is no material comparable to plastic, that is to say, plastic has no real competitors.
How does plastic come from?
Plastic, in fact, is a polymer, which is extracted from natural gas, coal and oil. The manufacturing process includes several steps, such as refining, molding, curing, etc. special catalysts are needed to improve the reaction rate.
The key step of the whole process is polymerization. In this process, the monomer is used as raw material to form polymer plastics.
It has been said that the whole economy of the world is based on fossil fuels. Therefore, people have been trying to make use of the by-products extracted from fossil raw materials. Plastics are the result of the by-product processing.
As early as 1855, photographer and chemist Alexander parks invented the earliest material "Celluloid", which is the predecessor of plastic;
In 1838-1872, PVC was polymerized for the first time, which was the world's largest production of general-purpose plastics; in 1907, a key breakthrough occurred, and Leo Baekeland, an American chemist of Belgian origin, invented bakelite, which was the first real synthetic plastic, and mass produced.
Since the founding of Baekeland, many new plastics have been developed to provide many satisfactory properties.
The emergence of disposable products, so that plastic into the company's sales field.
At that time, many drinks were bottled, such as coke. Every city has a coke bottler company, whose main purpose is to mix soda water and powder formula, and then bottle them for sale. Although the sales volume is very good, the biggest problem is that bottles should be recycled and reused, which is boring and costly. At this time, the emergence of plastic bottles perfectly solves the problem of bottle recycling.
Not only that, disposable cups are also welcomed by people. In the past, people had to sit down in the restaurant to drink coffee. You can't drink it in the car or on the road, because your cups have to be returned, and disposable cups can take people's coffee time to any place, no longer limited. The restaurant also doesn't need to pay people to wash cups, so it's catering Welcome to business.
Gradually, plastic became a necessity and a pollutant.
Like everything else, nothing is perfect.
At first, plastic seemed to have all the characteristics of an ideal material, so it was very popular and became indispensable. But now, millions of tons of plastic pollute the ocean. In 2010, about 8 million tons of plastic waste were dumped in the oceans around the world.
So the question comes, how does plastic become a pollution problem?
As we all know, plastics are difficult to decompose.
A plastic cup can stay in the soil for up to 50 years without degradation, which is the dark side of the plastic and the reason why it is closely connected with pollution.
At the beginning, people didn't know how to deal with those plastic packages, but just threw them out of the windows or doors at will. With the passage of time, people found that plastic is difficult to degrade, and more and more plastic also caused people's thinking about pollution.
Although we know the existence of plastic pollution, we still can't get rid of it.
Among all the obstacles, one of the main problems is that plastic is cheap.
Yes, you are right. Their manufacturing cost is very low, and the recycled plastic is more expensive than the original similar products. Therefore, many companies think that it is more economical to make new plastic than to separate and recycle plastic.
Secondly, there are many kinds of plastics on the market. Although the appearance is similar, the chemical cost may be different, which brings a big problem to recycling. If manual recycling is used for classification, the cost is higher.
The point is, so far, there is no material that can completely replace plastic.
If so, will it cause pollution and other problems like plastic? We don't know.
Last
Plastic is a kind of material that people love and hate.
Although there are many problems with plastic products, they are still valuable. In 2019, the global plastic market size is $568.7 billion.
And we also have a misunderstanding, the pollution of the earth is not a problem of plastic alone, paper industry leads to deforestation, coal industry leads to air pollution, excessive use of water resources leads to climate change, fertilizer industry leads to water pollution and so on.
For the problem of plastic pollution, our best way is not to litter, and to form a good concept of environmental protection. In the face of every problem, we should consider "which pollution, which no pollution", rather than "which pollution is less".
