Economic Aspects of Aromatics

Lowenheim and Moran, Faith, Keyes, and Clark s Industrial Chemicals, pp. 

Over 100 billion lb of chemicals and polymers per year are made from ethylene, by far the most important organic chemical. Over 40% of all organic chemicals by volume are derived from ethylene. Unfortunately, we cannot describe the interesting chemistry and uses for all the important derivatives of ethylene. We will limit our detailed discussion to those chemicals made from ethylene that appear in the top 50, which amount to 8 important organic chemicals. These are listed in Table 9.1. 

Ethylene dichloride Vinyl chloride Acetic acid Vinyl acetate Ethylbenzene Styrene Ethylene oxide Ethylene glycol 

---