Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Plastics (Encore)

Starting point is 00:00:00 The following is an encore presentation of Everything Everywhere Daily. At the 1862 London International Exhibition, an inventor by the name of Andrew Parks introduced a new product based on cellulose that he called Parkseen. Little did he know that this material, which could be made elastic when heated and molded into almost any shape imaginable, would become the basis for an enormous percentage of all the materials in common use in the 21st century. Learn more about plastics, how they were invented, and how they're used in the modern world. episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story

Starting point is 00:00:57 that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. Plastics are really nothing more than a synthetic substance whose main ingredients are polymers. Polymers are very long molecules that consist of the same subunit over and over, and in the case of plastics, they're almost always carbon-based organic molecules. There are some substances that are natural plastics, in particular the sap from rubber trees, which is used to

Starting point is 00:01:34 make natural rubber. In fact, the origin of plastics can be directly tied to natural rubber. In 1839, American Charles Goodyear developed a process called a vulcanization, which could harden natural rubber, which made it more useful for many products. The Goodyear Tire Company was named after him, but it wasn't actually founded by him. It was founded almost 40 years after his death. This experimentation with natural rubber eventually led to what is considered the birth of the modern plastics industry, park scene. Andrew Park created a substance that was developed from cellulose, which is commonly found in plants and is what makes up most paper. His park scene is a type of plastic known as a celluloid.

Starting point is 00:02:14 Celluloids are created from nitrocellulose, which is made by combining primarily in nitric acid, sulfuric acid, and cellulose. Parks material won a medal at the 1862 London International Exhibition. However, he was never able to convert his invention into a viable company, and he went out of business in 1868. The plastic ball was picked up by American inventor John Wesley Hyatt. Hyatt was responding to a challenge by the billiard ball company, Felon and Collander, who offered a $10,000 prize to anyone who could come up with a substitute for ivory for the

Starting point is 00:02:47 manufacturing of billiard balls. Even as early as 1868, ivory was in short supply due to a shortage of elephants. Hyatt experimented with several substances until eventually coming up with a substance he called celluloid, very similar to the substance Andrew Park developed several years before. There's no record of him ever collecting the billiard ball prize, but he did start the Albany billiard ball company, which specialized in plastic billiard balls. More importantly, he developed a far more efficient method of creating celluloid. than Parks method. With this, he expanded into the creation of false teeth, piano keys, and most importantly, film. He also patented the first system for injection molding of plastics in 1878,

Starting point is 00:03:29 even though that wouldn't become commonplace for another 50 years. Here, I should also note that celluloid is extremely flammable. It can self-combust when heated to temperatures over 150 degrees Celsius or about 300 degrees Fahrenheit. And that is a very big problem when reels of celluloid film had to be run in front of a very hot bulb for motion pitchers. Celluloid was the basis for most plastics for the next several decades. It almost single-handedly was responsible for the dramatic reduction in the use of natural materials from animals, such as ivory and tortoise shell. Table tennis balls were actually still made out of celluloid up until 2014. The cellulose used in celluloid came from organic materials such as cotton, and celluloid still had the problem of being

Starting point is 00:04:13 extremely flammable. The next big plastic innovation, which addressed many of the of the problems with celluloid came with the development of Bakelite. The full chemical name of which is polyoxybenzymethyl methyl and glycol anhydride. It was the first fully synthetic plastic, and it was developed by the Belgian-American chemist Leo Baceland. Baceland, by the way, was the person who first used the term plastic as a noun. Before that, it was just an adjective. Baclin was looking for a replacement for natural shellac. Schallack is a resin that comes from the lack bug, which is found in South and Southeast Asia. As with ivory, the source of Shalak made the supply rather limited. Bakelight was also an electrical insulator, and unlike celluloid, it wasn't highly

Starting point is 00:04:55 flammable. Baceland established the General Bakelite Company in 1910 and licensed the patent to other companies outside of the United States. One of the first uses for Bakelight was in early electronics. If you've ever seen a photo or an old movie where there's a classic black telephone on a desk, that was almost certainly made out of Bakelight. Bakelight was cheap, could be molded into almost any shape, and could be made into almost any color. Bakelight jewelry became fashionable in the 1920s as it offered shapes and colors that weren't possible before. Bakelight jewelry actually became high fashion, with it being promoted on the pages of Vogue and designed by Coco Chanel. It eventually found its way into pieces for board games, gun handles, and kitchenware.

Starting point is 00:05:36 If you ever find a plastic object that's from before World War II, there's a very good chance that it's made out of Bakelight. Bakelight and celluloid were far from the only plastics from before the Second World War. Many other polymers were developed that fall under the umbrella of plastics that you might not think of as plastic. Cellophane was invented around the same time as Bakelight by the Swiss chemist Jacques Brandenberger. Like celluloid, it's also made from cellulose, and it's still produced today for some packaging items and for tape. In 1933, polyethylene was developed in England, and it was actually considered a state secret, because it was lightweight and used for insulating cable on airplanes. Polyethylene is the most common plastic which is manufactured today.

Starting point is 00:06:17 And globally, there are over 100 million tons of polyethylene resin produced every year. There are many different types of polyethylene with different recipes depending on what will be used. Most plastic bottles in the world today are some form of polyethylene. In the 1930s, polystyrene began to be produced at an industrial level. It was actually discovered from natural sources almost 100 years earlier. You probably know polystyrene better as styrofoam, or in the type of plastic used in solo cups, or in the hard plastic used in CD cases, for those of you who can remember CD cases. The DuPont Corporation released a synthetic substitute for silk in 1939 known as nylon.

Starting point is 00:06:58 Nylon was first sold as the bristles and toothbrushes, but it became a massive hit when it was used for women's stockings in the 1940s. It would take me forever to go through every single type of plastic, but plastic devised. development and innovation continued after World War II. Other plastics and polymers were invented in manufacture including polyester in the 1950s, and polycellphone and Kevlar in the 1960s. Plastics are so ubiquitous today that we almost never even think about them, let alone the different types of plastics that can be used with different properties. Today, you can buy plastics wholesale in the form of tiny little pellets. These pellets can then be melted and injection molded to make pretty much anything you want. I've talked about many different techniques.

Starting point is 00:07:39 on this podcast, and I've made the claim that the modern world couldn't exist without them. But I think that is especially true in the case of plastics. Odds are, most of you listening to the sound of my voice right now are doing so on some device that uses plastic. If you have earbuds in right now, they're probably plastic. If you're using a smart speaker, it's plastic. If you're in your car, the dashboard and a good part of the car stereo face are plastic. There's a good chance that your clothing and shoes are also based on plastic. Plastics have done a lot of good, and they're extremely useful. They have more than anything else eliminated the demand for goods like ivory, which were threatening certain animal species.

Starting point is 00:08:20 However, plastics do have their downside. As we consume more and more plastics, this downside is becoming more and more apparent. One of the biggest downsides to most plastics is that they don't degrade well naturally. A paper bag or a cardboard box will naturally decompose in anywhere from a few weeks to a couple of months depending on conditions and the material. Most plastics, however, will take 400 years to decompose. On top of that, most plastics float. This has resulted in an enormous amount of plastic that is now floating out in the ocean. In the middle of the Pacific ocean is a spot known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which is almost entirely plastic. It's believed that the garbage patch has actually been there since the 1940s, but it's been

Starting point is 00:09:05 increasing tenfold every decade since 1945. I've personally seen beaches all over the world, which were just covered in plastic trash, which washed up on shore after being disposed thousands of miles away. Believe it or not, 90% of the plastic waste in the ocean comes from just 10 rivers. 8 are in Asia and 2 are in Africa. The Yangtzee, Indus, yellow, hi-hee, Ganges, Pearl, Armour, Mekong, Nile and Niger rivers. All 10 of these rivers have very large populations living on them, with very poor sanitation systems. There are a host of ideas for cleaning up the garbage patch, but that's probably worth its own episode at some point in the future. If you think the solution is recycling more plastic, I have some bad news for you. Plastics are one of the least

Starting point is 00:09:55 recycled products. If you put something plastic into a recycling bin, statistically speaking, based on global recycling rates. Only about 20% of it will actually be recycled. 55% of it will be dumped in a landfill, and the rest will be incinerated. The problem with plastic recycling is that all plastics are different. Even plastics that are, in theory, the same type, have different additives and dyes. That makes the end product not very desirable to most manufacturers, and recycled plastic is often more expensive than new plastic. The good news is that there are some technologies on the horizon that might solve this problem. In particular, microbes and enzymes that can quickly digest plastics down to their component parts.

Starting point is 00:10:39 One experimental enzyme can break down plastic bottles in as little as six hours, and the resulting materials can be used as base materials for making brand-new plastics. One of the other big problems with plastics is microplastics. This hasn't gotten nearly as much attention as floating bottles simply because, researchers are just discovering how pervasive it is. Microplastics are defined as any piece of plastic smaller than 5mm. However, we are now finding bits of plastic that are much smaller that can be classified as nanoplastics, which are under one micrometer in size. So far, these have been found to be everywhere. And by everywhere, I literally mean everywhere.

Starting point is 00:11:21 They have been found in Antarctica, in rainwater, in human blood, soils on everywhere, and every continent. A recent study I just saw last week found it in samples of human lung tissue. The particles are so small that they can be carried long distances by wind and rain. They're also so small that they can cross cell walls and affect the functioning of individual cells. Some estimates show that the amount of microplastics in the ocean to be as much as 30% of the macroplastics we can see floating with our eyes. This is all a pretty new field of research, so there is a lot we don't know about the impact of micro and nanoplastics. yet. Most micro and nanoplastics are believed to come from tires, clothing, and footwear.

Starting point is 00:12:03 The wear from car tires is believed to be the largest source of microplastics by a wide margin. Microplastics from clothing largely come from the erosion of synthetic materials during the washing process. There are also products that include microbeads of plastic as an abrasive agent. These are normally found in soap, face and body wash products, and toothpaste. Some countries have already banned the use of plastic microbeads and more likely to do so soon. So plastics are a double-edged sword. They have indeed made the modern world possible and have improved the living conditions for billions of people, allowing clothing and other items to be manufactured affordably. On the other hand, plastics in the ocean and microplastics that

Starting point is 00:12:43 are well, everywhere, are also major issues that still have to be addressed. Either way, much of the advancement in material science in the last century and a half can be boiled down to just one word. Plastics. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Benji Long and Cameron Kiever. I want to give a big shout out to everyone who supports the show over on Patreon, including the show's producers. Your support helps me put out a show every single day.

Starting point is 00:13:16 And also, Patreon is currently the only place where Everything Everywhere Daily merchandise is available to the top tier of supporters. If you'd like to talk to other listeners of the show and members of the completionist Club, you can join the Everything Everywhere Daily Facebook group or Discord server. Links to everything are in the show notes. Ben. Excuse me. Mr. McGuire.

Starting point is 00:13:39 Ben. Mr. McGuire. Come with me for a minute. I want to talk to you. Excuse us to you in. I'm curious. Thank you. I look at him and I can't believe it.

Starting point is 00:13:56 I just want to say one word to you. Just one word. Yes, sir. Are you listening? Yes, I am. Plastics. Exactly, how do you mean? There's a great future in plastics.

Starting point is 00:14:15 Think about it. Will you think about it? Yes, I will. Not said.

Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Plastics (Encore)

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