Perth Amboy, New Jersey

Approximately 3000 yd of soil contaminated with polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH) was treated nsing this technology at an oil refinery in Perth Amboy, New Jersey. The vendor estimated that the cost of this project was 50/yd (D213718, p. 8). 

We learned much from nature with these early attempts to produce useful polymer products based on modified, or reconstituted ( semisynthetic ) natural polymers, and many of these processes are still in use today. The first of the purely synthetic commercial polymers came with the small-scale introduction of Bakelite in 1907. This phenol-formaldehyde resin product was developed by Leon Baekeland. It rapidly became a commercial reality with the formation of The General Bakelite Company by Baekeland, and construction of a larger plant at Perth Amboy, New Jersey, in 1910. At about this time styrene was being combined with dienes in the early commercialization of processes to produce synthetic rubber. Polystyrene itself was not a commercial product in Germany until 1930 and in the U.S.A. in 1937. The only other purely synthetic polymers that made a commercial appearance during this early development period were polyvinyl chloride and polyvinyl acetate, both in the early 1920s. 

Leo Hendrik Baekeland s process for the phenol-formaldehyde polycondensation resin that he called Bakelite was patented in 1907 and commercialized by his General Bakelite Company, established in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, in 1910. A British factory, a subsidiary of Bakelite s German holding company, was opened at Cowley, Middlesex, in 1914. Baekeland also coined the name Novolac, which at one time was used as the trade mark for Novolak phenol-formaldehyde resins, following his observation that they behaved like lac resins. Phenol-formaldehyde resins were found to be thermosetting (hard and unmouldable when heated), and formed by condensation ... 

Bakelite plant (in Perth Amboy, New Jersey), Baekeland... 

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