Plastic Age

Plastic Age, 17th ed., Japan Plastics Industry Annual, Tokyo, 1974. 

Plastic is forever.Whether future archaeologists will find our plastics neatly arranged in dump sites or scattered everywhere across the globe, find them they will. They will still be there long after the wood has rotted, the concrete crumbled and the iron rusted away. This will be known as the Plastic Age". 

Evans, L. S. (1963) Rubber and Plastics Age 44, 1349. The chemical resistance of rubber and plastics. 

As previously mentioned, past studies used non-filtered air with unknown concentrations of trace gases at unknown relative humidities. Also, many of the studies used plastic aging chambers that may have introduced volatile monomers into the air. These unknown factors are important to determine in order to fully understand the nature of the ultrafine particle mode. According to the classical thermodynamic theory of ion cluster formation (Coghlan and Scott, 1983), the relative humidity and trace gases will affect the existence of condensation nuclei. Megaw and Wiffen (1961) observed an increase in nuclei formation with the presence of sulfur dioxide. 

Inoue, T., Liquid crystalline polymers, in Plastics Age Encyclopedia, Plastics Age Company Ltd, Osaka, Japan, Ch. IV-4, pp. 176-182. 

Polymer science and technology have developed tremendously over the last few decades, and the production of polymers and plastics products has increased at a remarkable pace. By the end of 2000, nearly 200 million tons per year of plastic materials were produced worldwide (about 2% of the wood used, and nearly 5% of the oil harvested) to fulfill the ever-growing needs of the plastic age in the industrialized world plastic materials are used at a rate of nearly 100 kg per person per year. Plastic materials with over 250 billion per year contribute about 4% to the gross domestic product in the United States. Plastics have no counterpart in other materials in terms of weight, ease of fabrication, efficient utilization, and economics. 

L 7. —, and J. Scanlan Polymer applications of dicumyl peroxide. Rubber and Plastics Age 1963, 1315. 

With the advent of the polymer or plastic age, scientists had yet another group of chemicals to coat and treat the ancient raw material, wood. During World War II, phenol-formaldehyde, based on the research of the Forest Products Laboratory, was used to treat wood veneer and to form the composite into airplane propellers. Today, this same "Compreg" is used for cutlery handles throughout the world. 

Repeat this scenario with just about any common object you can think of, and you begin to understand why polymers are so common. Plastics come in an extremely wide range of compositions, with different physical and mechanical properties, chemical resistance, and cost. They can be molded, blow-molded, extruded, and shaped into an infinite variety of one-, two-, and three-dimensional shapes and objects. They can be made optically clear translucent, opaque, textured, and multicolored. They have made available to all of us household items that were once enjoyed only by the extremely wealthy (Wascher 1988). Thus the evolution of what many call the Plastic Age was inevitable. 

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