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May 3, 2013

Strange But True!

Q. The story of plastic began in the 1850s with creation of Parkesine, by British inventor Alexander Parkes, and then 50 years later came Bakelite, by American chemist Leo Hendrik Baekeland, whose “Material of a Thousand Uses” was molded into telephones, home appliances, cameras, and, oh, 997 other shapes. How has this story played out in our society today?

A. The world’s 7.2 billion people use some 600 billion pounds of plastics annually, with the market still growing by about 5 percent per year, says Rebecca Coffey in Discover magazine. Plastics are made from l-o-n-g chain polymeric molecules, like strings of beads that can fold and curl, the most common being polyethylene in grocery bags and bottles. In one recent year, grocery bags alone numbered more than 100 billion in the U.S., enough if strung together to circle the Earth nearly 800 times.


 
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