Life in PLASTIC, it's fantastic

“I’m a Barbie girl, in the Barbie world. Life in plastic, it’s fantastic”, sings Aqua-Lene, putting her finger on “the very worst”: plastic, the material we love to hate.

By Julie Maske

Plastic is everywhere, in everything and for everybody. In every imaginable shape, colour and variation, in the loveliest designs and as imitations of luxury articles we could never afford to buy. Around 600 BC, the Greek philosopher Thales came to the conclusion that everything consisted of water. In our modern era, we will soon be able to say that everything consists of plastic.
From the very moment when we get up in the morning, stick our toothbrush into our mouth and hide behind the shower curtain, until we go to bed at night with a repeat of the same ritual, we have been clothing ourselves in, sitting upon, and eating off, plastic.

In the Stone Age
– Without plastic we would still be living in the Stone Age says research scientist Paal Skjetne in the Chemical Engineering Department at SINTEF Applied Chemistry.
– Just imagine the health services without disposable articles; it would be like the Black Death again, adds his colleague Heidi Johnsen in the Polymer Chemistry Department of SINTEF Applied Chemistry. Both researchers work with plastic every day, and their heads are full of stories about, and knowledge of, plastics.
– Many eras are characterized by the materials that were most important for the organization of society. The 20th century acquired several labels of this sort, such as the Nuclear Age and the Oil Age. But it could just as well have been called the Age of Plastic. Just look around you; much of what you see is plastic and there will be more of it in the future. In fifty years half of everything around us will be some or other variety of plastic. Our way of life today would be simply impossible without plastic, says Paal Skjetne. He points to the telephone, moulded in plastic, and my stockings, woven in nylon, another type of plastic. My sweater is a polyester/Spandex knit. The principles of making clothes are the same as they were in the Stone Age, only the materials technology is different.
The concept of plastics is wide-ranging, and it embraces more than many of us realize.
– So what are plastics?
– Since the beginning of time, Nature has been making polymers via intricate processes that we have been trying to imitate. Plastics are man-made polymers. They usually consist of oil and gas molecules that have undergone certain chemical processes. Plastics are built up of long chains of microscopic building blocks, explains Heidi Johnsen. – The building blocks are what we call “monomers”. “Mono” means “single”, and when these blocks are linked up in a chemical process, they become “polymers”, which can be processed and utilized in all sorts of versions. At SINTEF Applied Chemistry we are developing new types of plastic for different areas of use, and at the same time we are improving existing plastics in order to make them more versatile.

Photo: Megapix/NPS

Copying silk
The conception of plastics was inspired by silk, one of Nature’s miracles, and by mankind’s greed for riches. Silk has always been a fascinating and fashionable material, which as early as the 17th century had scientists seeking its “recipe”, in order to be able to produce it themselves. Roman emperors and Italian women paid huge sums to clothe themselves in silk and Venetian traders wanted to get their hands on the gold that ended up in Asia as payment for this smooth, light material.
But more than 200 years were to pass before rayon, the first artificial silk, was produced from natural cellulose polymers in 1889. In their search for artificial silk, and as replacements for other scarce natural raw materials, chemists developed the knowledge that was needed to make plastics, but they lacked the piece of the chemical puzzle that was essential to produce this material as we know it today.

Electricity for everyone
– So when did man succeed in making the very first plastic material?
– The Age of Plastics started in 1907, when the Belgian chemist Leo Baekeland mixed the chemicals that he then cooked together into Bakelite. Baekeland was looking for a material that could be used as insulation in electrical equipment and around electric cables. His invention enabled electricity to be brought into every home. Daily life became more easy, and conditions were ripe for a revolution in how we organized our lives, explains Skjetne.
Baekeland set the wheels in motion. Other chemists followed after, with new mixtures, based on other recipes that led to better, more versatile, and flexible plastics.
– Making plastics can be like magic. Different plastics at first may appear identical to the user, but minute differences in the chemical composition of each batch produced can result in very distinct material behaviour, explains Johnsen.
– What is it that causes the differences?
– It all depends on the temperature and the composition of the mixture inside the reactor, says the scientist, adding that the properties of a given plastic depend on the composition of the polymer chain and its additives. These determine whether the material will be hard or soft, strong or weak, brittle or tough. Plastics can also be combined with fibre-glass and other materials to create composites with unique properties.

Reinforcement
The fields of application of plastics become even wider when they are combined with materials that compensate for their weaker aspects, in terms of tensile strength and stiffness. Just like a concrete building that has been strengthened with reinforcement bars, plastics can be reinforced with fibre-glass or carbon fibre. Combinations of this sort are known as composites.
– Composites can be stronger than steel and the ratio of stiffness to weight can also be higher, says Reidar Stokke, research scientist in the Polymers and Composites Department of SINTEF Materials Technology. Composites are in everyday use in skis and ski-poles, fishing rods, bicycle frames, leisure craft, wind-turbine blades and the spherical radomes that protect radar stations.
– As far as offshore applications of composites are concerned, SINTEF is at the leading edge. Composites are used in piping systems and tanks, in covers for subsea installations and in protective walls in platform living quarters. Their advantages include low weight, corrosion resistance and a long life-cycle, explains Stokke.

Better than their reputation
The global production of plastics in 1990 was 80 million tonnes. Much of this consisted of packaging material, which has ended up on a steadily growing mountain of waste, which is one reason that environmental organizations all over the world are demanding that the production and use of plastics should be cut back.
– Plastics are better than their reputation. They are environmentally friendly, cheap and available to everyone, claims Paal Skjetne, who offers a comparison of the relative costs of plastic and paper carrier bags.
– To transport equal numbers of plastic and paper bags would take a single truck for the plastic bags versus seven for the paper bags. We need to take the environmental impact of this fact into account. When a plastic bag is dropped on the ground, it represents aesthetic pollution, until someone removes it. But paper abandoned in the environment dissolves, leaving behind a cocktail of chemicals, insist the researchers, who believe that we should distinguish between visual and chemical contamination. They draw attention to the light weight of plastics compared with other materials, and hope that the critics can see the ramifications of this in a wider context. Imitations in plastic are lighter than wood, plastic pipes are lighter and more durable than concrete. The energy that goes into producing plastics is saved in terms of transport and the life cycle.

Photo: Cathrine Dillner Hagen

Reducing social inequalities
If we were able to choose, many of us would prefer to live in a “plastic-free” society, surrounded by wood and cotton, silk and linen. Natural materials are felt to be living, warm and genuine, while plastics are seen as fake; “plastic”, cold and hard.
When the first synthetic plastics arrived on the market, they rapidly became exclusive articles in high demand. Such materials fulfilled an aesthetic function in addition to their practical and useful virtues. Imitations of the miracles of nature found a place in many homes, often being given the appearance of mahogany or marble. As plastics became cheaper to produce and were manufactured in ever greater volume, everyone could afford them. When the poor were able to own the same things as the rich there was a counter-reaction that characterized plastic products as kitschy and fake. Several generations of consumers grew up with the image of plastics as cheap.
– Plastics have been of great importance for the development of society. They have helped to reduce visible social inequalities, says Paal Skjetne.

Nylon stockings and war

The Second World War accelerated the development of plastics. When the USA joined the War in 1941 following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the West was cut off from its sources of crude rubber. Japan controlled South-East Asia, including the countries that produced 90 % of the USA’s supplies of rubber.

There was an urgent need for rubber, and the American authorities put pressure on the country’s scientists to find synthetic substitutes for the war effort. The solution was a polymer made from butadiene, a synthetic rubber that solved the problems of rubber supplies for the allied forces. Problems with importing other materials after the War also accelerated the development of mass-produced plastic products for ordinary consumers. Porcelain was replaced by Tupperware and beautiful designs from Alessi and Bodum.
The dream of producing synthetic silk was shelved when it was found that cloth could be woven from rayon in the 19th century, but when Wallace Carothers invented nylon in 1931 he created an artificial luxury material. Scarcely ten years later the synthetic threads made their breakthrough, as an extra “skin” on beautiful female legs, as parachute cloth and in fishing nets. Today, the product has been improved and is used as a reinforcing material in socks and clothing. Many Norwegian entrepreneurs found themselves in the UK and the USA during the War. They let themselves be seduced by the plastics revolution, and drew the rest of the country along with them when they set up companies all over Norway for the manufacture of toothbrushes, plastic basins and pails. At first, they imported their raw materials from abroad, but in 1951 Norsk Hydro started PVC production. The sector grew from 15 manufacturing companies in 1949 to much more than 500 by the end of the century.

Consumer society
With the growth of the environmental movement in the 1970s and demands for greater awareness, it seemed as though people were coming out of a long trance. As the mountains of trash grew, there was also growing a desire for more recycling, lowered consumption and the use of environmentally friendly materials. At the same time, scientists were experimenting with extending the uses of plastics to a far wider range of purposes than previously. The waste problem was solved by turning trash into a resource.
– Did you know that fleece is made from recycled plastic bottles? About 50 soft drinks bottles go into a sweater. The seats and backs of HÅG’s range of office chairs are made of old lemonade bottle stoppers. A hundred tonnes of stoppers can be turned into 50 000 new chairs. Many plastic products can be melted down and used in new connections, reveals Skjetne.
About 750 million carrier bags are produced in Norway every year. If they were laid out they would cover an area as large as the City of Trondheim (or 53 000 football pitches, or 336 square kilometres). For this reason, many chain stores insist on using recycled plastic in their carrier bags.
– Some types of plastic cannot be recycled, either because they are contaminated or because they consist of materials that do not lend themselves to reuse. However, they have a high combustion value, says Heidi Johnsen, adding that burning plastic is not necessarily a waste of resources. Some waste combustion plants add plastic to their furnaces to raise the temperature, not least to help them burn wet waste. The energy they generate is circulated to district heating systems.

Green plastic
The petrochemical industry uses about 270 million tonness of oil and gas a year, i.e. about 4 % of the world’s hydrocarbon consumption, in plastics production. This is as a source of power for the production process as well as the raw material itself that ends up in the form of washing-up bowls, mobile telephones, computers and rubber boots. Both research scientists and environmental activists wish to replace oil and gas with plant materials to create “green plastics”. This would increase the use of renewable resources and reduce waste mountains, because such plastics are degraded when they are discarded. So far, it has turned out that such plastic products cost more to produce than equivalent ones derived from oil. Furthermore, the degradation process produces carbon dioxide, a gas that contributes to the global greenhouse effect. So it is an open question how environmentally friendly “green” plastic really is.
– For the health sector, the development of plastic products has made everyday life easier for both personnel and patients. If it becomes possible to use “green” plastics in this sector it will make many things simpler, and there are a number of fields in which plastics will work wonders. For example, they can be programmed to disintegrate gradually, enabling medicines to be released slowly inside the body. There already exist devices on “conventional” plastic that complement the body’s own mechanisms – for example, heart valves and replacements for hip joints, says Heidi Johnsen.

Heidi Johansen and Paal Skjetne, research scientists at SINTEF Applied Chemistry, can answer just about any question on plastics. Photo: Rune Petter Ness

Ugelstad spheres
A real quantum leap in medical science took place in 1978 when John Ugelstad and his colleagues at NTNU (at that time, NTH) and SINTEF succeeded in producing microscopically small plastic spheres. These “monodisperse particles” are all the same size and share identical properties. American scientists believed that we would have to go out into space to produce such tiny spheres, a belief that Professor Ugelstad at NTNU refuted by producing them on Earth. The result was a Norwegian industry with a global market, based on cooperation between SINTEF and the former Dyno Industrier.
The Ugelstad spheres can be used in DNA studies, in the production of antibodies for cancer treatment and in HIV research. The spheres can be magnetized and have a “hook” that attaches itself to bacteria, viruses and damaged cells, after which they can be removed from blood or tissue by means of a magnet. They are also used in the manufacture of floor coverings and rainwear, paints and glue. Scientists have also tried the spheres in the cosmetics industry, as copy-machine toner and in the automotive industry, but in these sectors they are still too expensive for commercial use. They can also be used in LCD screens in computers.

Future challenges
In the course of the first hundred years of plastics, scientists have managed to develop types of plastic that require less oil for their production, and at the same time are more versatile, durable, lighter and more user-friendly than they used to be. Continuing research on plastics has led to better utilization of both raw and recycled materials.
One of the biggest challenges currently facing scientists is that of discovering a polymer mixture that is durable, lightweight and cheap to produce, especially for use as a packaging material.
– Packaging is vital for food distribution and the pharmaceutical industry, both for hygiene and in order to reduce transport costs and environmental contamination. In order to improve performance, research is being done on extremely thin plastics that will have better properties than those we have today. The aim is to raise global standards of living, says Skjetne.
As far as the spokesmen and spokeswomen for plastics are concerned, there is little doubt that such materials will help to create a better world, at the very least. No matter how diehard an opponent of plastic you might be, it may be time to admit that the material has sovereign qualities. “Life in plastic, it’s fantastic!”

The development of plastics

• 1891 Discovery of rayon
• 1907 Invention of Bakelite
• 1926 Invention of PVC (polyvinyl chloride)
• 1933 Discovery of polyethylene (polythene)
• 1938 Accidental invention of teflon
• 1939 Commercial launch of nylon
• 1950s Tupperware revolution affects women’s lib
• 1956 Roof of Citroen DS made of polyester and fibreglass
• 1978 Ugelstad spheres create sensation

Gemini facts

Plastics can be produced from oil or gas that has undergone chemical processing, and consists of synthetic polymers. Not all polymers are plastics. Nature has always produced polymers such as cellulose, the DNA molecule and proteins. Plastic production was inspired by Nature’s polymers.

Different compositions result in plastics with various properties and characteristics. The plastic bulk material can be formed into products that can meet virtually all of our needs. The differences mean that certain types of plastic are suitable for carrier bags, others for moulded components of mobile telephones, hi-fi systems and boats.

Four percent of global oil production is used to produce plastics

Useful websites:

http://www.sintef.no/units/chem/plastics
http://www.plasticsresource.com
http://www.connecticutplastics.com/resources/connecticut-plastics-learning-center/an-introduction-to-plastics/