Open Writing

B.P.? Well, not the company, British Petroleum, though there is a connection. The B.P. I’m writing about is “Before Plastics.” Plastics, in their myriad forms, have become as synonymous with our lives as food and drink. The majority of people are only vaguely aware of the extent to which their lives are interwoven with them. The use of plastics in cars alone has become so endemic that it’s difficult for an owner to know where the metal leaves off and plastic begins. Even the paint finish is acrylic.

Plastics in everyday life made their debut in 1909, when Bakelite was first invented. This hard, phenolic resin soon found its way into products as diverse as electrical components, jewelry and cabinetry. Being the only game in town, often it was also miss-applied, and became connected in many people’s minds with cheap, trashy goods. Probably its largest use was in electrical products, but although it had excellent non-conducting properties, for which it was valued, it did not withstand heat well.

Since many electrical products such as light bulbs and toasters produce heat, the bakelite components decomposed and crumbled, often causing short circuits and fires. Despite those limitations, bakelite continued to be used until other plastics and ceramics became available. Many bakelite artifacts have become valuable collector’s items, particularly the jewelry, as my wife discovered when she asked the price of a bangle at a flea market, not realizing it was bakelite.

Bakelite ruled until around 1930, when an American chemist, Wallace Carothers, developed Nylon for E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company, later called just Dupont Even so, because it was deemed a strategic material, Nylon didn’t enter the public consciousness until the end of World War II, when “nylons” were highly sought after by women everywhere. It was their deliverance from fragile silk stockings, which, in any case, had only been available in Europe on the black market, or through a boyfriend if he happened to be a GI.

Nylons were almost indestructible, sheer, and available in a range of flattering colors, including “nude” and black. Like bakelite in its heyday, nylon was considered to be a wonder material, and just like its predecessor was often miss-applied, particularly in woven material for clothing. Nylon shirts certainly had the crease resistant properties claimed for them, but they were hot and clingy and difficult to dye permanently. Despite that, a movie was released in 1951, titled “The Man in the White Suit,” with nylon as its star. No matter that Alec Guinness and his co-star Joan Greenwood had the supporting roles.

By developing nylon for DuPont, Carothers and his colleagues had laid the foundation for modern polymer chemistry, no less than a materials revolution. In the 1967 movie “The Graduate,” a young Dustin Hoffman was offered the sound advice that if he wanted to succeed in life he should “Get into plastics.” A myriad other plastics have been developed on the heels of nylon, each with the intention of making polymers more “application specific.” In other words, recognizing that there’s no such thing as one plastic that fits all.

This has given rise to styrofoam, mylar, acrylic, polycarbonate, polyester (made famous by the leisure suit), polyethylene, polypropylene, polyvinyl chloride, polystyrene, formica, melamine, teflon and many other substances. Though these names are often household words, they are really no more than acronyms and mnemonics. The real names would confound pronunciation for most of us, as in the chemical name for mylar - Aliphatic polycaprolactone.

Or how about Acrylonitrile butadiene styrene, known to people in the business simply as ABS. ABS, noted for its strength and hardness, is a good example of how plastics have become application specific over time. In the early days, nylon and its immediate followers were considered to be the wonder materials, good for whatever you needed. But it soon became clear that nylon’s characteristic of “spreading” under pressure rendered it unsuitable for such uses as the socket of a hip replacement prosthesis, even though its low friction properties were attractive.

Probably the most novel plastic of recent times is carbon fiber, a polymer like the others, but highly resistant to heat. It is also lightweight, and where needed, flexible. Predictably, as with other new “wonder plastics,” the manufacturing industries rushed to use it, often inappropriately. In the most tragic example of its miss-application, 15 lives were lost in the 1979 Fastnet yacht race, at least in part because carbon fiber rudders, tillers and spars snapped in the stormy weather conditions.

Carbon fiber materials now contribute much to reducing the weight of civilian and military aircraft, and thereby reducing their fuel consumption. But there’s the rub; plastics are hydrocarbons, manufactured from oil. So it would seem that the advantage of fuel saving in cars and planes is not the free lunch we think it is, and is offset by the oil consumed to manufacture the plastic that makes them lighter.

Life before plastics there was, but polymers will be around, in land-fill dumps the size of small cities, long after homo sapiens has moved on. And what of British Petroleum? Well, it’s the third largest oil refiner in the world, and manufactures the chemicals used to make plastics. So you see, it wasn’t just a segue.

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