Polyvinyl Chloride PVC Real-World Chemistry

To get a little better feel for how the world of industrial chemistry operates, we will now consider a particular product, polyvinyl chloride (PVC), to see 

When you put on a nylon jacket, use a polyethylene wash bottle in the lab, wear contact lenses, or accidentally drop your telephone (and it doesn t break), you are benefiting from the properties of polymers. Polymers are very large molecules that are assembled from small units (called monomers). Because of their many useful properties, polymers are manufactured in huge quantities. In fact, it has been estimated that over 50% of all industrial chemists have jobs that are directly related to polymers. 

One particularly important polymer is polyvinyl chloride (PVC), which is made from the molecule commonly called vinyl chloride  

When many of these units are joined together, the polymer PVC results, 

Because the development of PVC into a useful, important material is representative of the type of problem solving encountered in industrial chemistry, we will consider it in some detail. 

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