causes of plastic

     

 Next time you do the shopping and carry home the things in a  plastic carry bag, think and realise that you are  contributing your share to a deadly plastic pollution whose ill effects are  irreversible and capable of reaching out to many generations  to come. Plastic is one of the major toxic pollutants of our time. Being composed of  toxic chemicals and most importantly a non biodegradable  substance, plastic pollutes earth and leads to air pollution and water pollution. There is no safe way to  dispose plastic waste.     

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ENVIRONMENT

Effects of Pollution

  Plastic wastes clog the drains and thus hit especially urban  sewage systems. The plastic wastes being dumped into rivers,  streams and sea contaminate the water, soil, marine life and also the air we  breathe. Choked drains provide excellent breeding grounds  for mosquitoes besides causing flooding during the monsoon. Since plastic does not undergo bacterial decomposition,  landfilling using plastic would mean preserving the poison  forever. Any attempt to get rid of plastic through landfills is also dangerous.  Apart form toxic seepage from the landfill resulting in the  contamination of precious water sources, the waste mass impedes the flow of  ground water. Landfills  are also prone to leaks. The wastes, especially cadmium and  lead in the wastes, invariably mix with rain water, then seep through the ground  and drain into nearby streams and lakes and other water  bodies. Thus the water we use gets poisoned.

                                The only way to overcome the deadly and lasting danger of  plastic pollution is to cut down the use of plastic, if possible avoid  it altogether. Say NO to plastic whenever and wherever you can. Prefer to   carry your own bags for grocery shopping, a jute or cloth  bag. All attempts made to put an end to plastic pollution will be a REAL BENEFIT for  your grand children. Let us contribute our part, save our  environment from plastic pollution and make it a better environment for future.

                                   

                       Plastic causes serious damage to environment during its  production process and during its disposal process. So the  only way to reduce the hazards of plastic pollution is to reduce the use of plastic and  thereby force a reduction in its production. The major chemicals that go into the making of plastic are  highly toxic and pose serious threat to living beings of all  species on earth. Some of the constituents of plastic such as benzene and  vinyl chloride are proved to cause cancer, and other gases  and liquid hydrocarbons spoil earth and air. The noxious substances emitted  during the production of plastic are synthetic chemicals  like ethylene oxide, benzene and xylenes. Besides hitting hard the ecosystem  which is already fragile, these chemicals can cause an array  of maladies ranging from birth defects to cancer, damage the nervous system and  the immune system and also adversely affect the blood and  the kidneys. And, many of these toxic substance are emitted during recycling of  plastic too. Like in the case of all other chemical substances,  ‘disposal’ of plastic is a myth. Once plastic is produced,  the harm introduced is almost permanent. Plastic defies any kind of attempt at disposal,  be it through recycling, burning or landfilling. When you  recycle a hazard, you pave way for another hazard. Recycling of a plastic  merely puts it back into the market  place and eventually into the environment, thereby making no reduction in its use. The  recycled plastic degrades in quality and necessitates the production of more new plastic  to make the original product.

                                   When plastic is burned, it has its own disadvantages.  When burned, plastic releases a host of poisonous chemicals  including dioxin into the air. Apart from these dangers, recycling of plastic is  very uneconomical, dirty and labour intensive as has been  revealed by studies conducted by many 'Public Interest Research Groups'. Recycling  of plastic is associated with skin and respiratory problems  resulting from exposure to and inhalation of toxic fumes, especially  hydrocarbons and residues released during the process.

Plastic is the general common term for a wide range of synthetic or semi synthetic organic amorphous solid materials suitable for the manufacture of industrial products. Plastics are typically polymers of high molecular weight, and may contain other substances to improve performance and/or reduce costs.

Plastic: Pollution-Problems-Precaution

Filed Under: Environment, I Care, Personal by admin — 5 CommentsJune 12, 2009Plastic is the general common term for a wide range of synthetic or semi synthetic organic amorphous solid materials suitable for the manufacture of industrial products. Plastics are typically polymers of high molecular weight, and may contain other substances to improve performance and/or reduce costs.

 It refers to their malleability or plasticity during manufacture that allows them to be cast, pressed, or extruded into an enormous variety of shapes – such as films, fibres, plates, tubes, bottles, boxes, and much more.

20% of solid municipal wastes in India are plastic. Non-degradable plastics accumulate at the rate of 25 million tonnes per year. According to an estimate more than 100 million tonnes of plastic is produced every year all over the world. In India use of plastic is 3 kg per person per year

                                              

  Plastic Problems

Plastics are used because they are easy and cheap to make and they can last a long time. Urbanisation has added to the plastic pollution in concentrated form in cities. Plastic does not decompose, and requires high energy ultra-violet light to break down.

Plastic thrown on land can enter into drainage lines and chokes them resulting into floods in local areas in cities as experienced in Mumbai, India in 1998. It was claimed in one of the programmes on TV Channel that eating plastic bags results in death of 100 cattle’s per day in U.P. in India. In stomach of one dead cow, as much as 35 kg of plastic was found.

More than 90% of the articles found on the sea beaches contained plastic. The plastic rubbish found on beaches near urban areas tends to originate from use on land, such as packaging material used to wrap around other goods. On remote beaches the rubbish tends to have come from ships, such as fishing equipment used in the fishing industry.

Plastics are used because they are easy and cheap to make and they can last a long time. Urbanisation has added to the plastic pollution in concentrated form in cities. Plastic does not decompose, and requires high energy ultra-violet light to break down.

Plastic thrown on land can enter into drainage lines and chokes them resulting into floods in local areas in cities as experienced in Mumbai, India in 1998. It was claimed in one of the programmes on TV Channel that eating plastic bags results in death of 100 cattle’s per day in U.P. in India. In stomach of one dead cow, as much as 35 kg of plastic was found.

More than 90% of the articles found on the sea beaches contained plastic. The plastic rubbish found on beaches near urban areas tends to originate from use on land, such as packaging material used to wrap around other goods. On remote beaches the rubbish tends to have come from ships, such as fishing equipment used in the fishing industry.

       Precautions

“Ideally, the best methods of reuse are ways that will keep these plastics out of the landfill the longest.”
Plastic water and soft drink bottles are sold with the intention of single use, then recycling, they can be safely reused if cleaned and handled properly. The keys are to ensure that the bottle is not damaged, has been thoroughly cleaned before each use, and is filled with clean tap water.

             Different ways to reuse the plastic bags:

 •Use them to dust off out-of-season on shoes or seasonal articles.
 •Use the bags as gloves to clean dustbins, or using pesticides.
 •When packing a suitcase, use them to keep shoes from soiling clothes and dirty things from clean ones.
 •To protect small outdoor plants from rain or frost at night, cover them with bags and tie the handles tightly around the pots. Be sure to take the bags off in the morning.
 •Use as a barrier between you and your trash: for those with infrequent trash pickups, use as an extra layer for strong smelling kitchen waste. Or replace trash bags: use for the bathroom, the car, or even to replace kitchen trash bags.
 •Use as over dirty shoes to avoid tracking mud, or to put over shoes while doing gardening.
 •Ask stores if they will take the bags back. Encourage your local retailer to do the same.
 •For those who are interested in something a little bit more long lasting, consider learning how to craft with plastic bags, like carpet, shopping bags.

dangers of plastic bags

Single-use bags, both paper and plastic, represent a huge threat to the environment. This threat is not only related to the sheer volume of them ending up in landfill, but also to the resources needed to produce, transport and (occasionally) recycle them, and the emissions resulting from these processes. Single-use plastic bags are also well known for their interference in ecosystems and the part they play in flood events, where they clog pipes and drains.

Envirosax presents a fashionable and practical solution to the problem of disposable plastic bags (each Envirosax potentially replaces the use of 6,000 bags during its lifetime), so please make a move in the right direction and help to reduce the impact of plastic bag waste worldwide by buying a reusable bag today!

Plastic bag facts

Approx. 380 billion plastic bags are used in the United States every year. That’s more than 1,200 bags per US resident, per year.

Approx. 100 billion of the 380 billion are plastic shopping bags.

An estimated 12 million barrels of oil is required to make that many plastic bags.

Only 1 to 2% of plastic bags in the USA end up getting recycled.

Thousands of marine animals and more than 1 million birds die each year as a result of plastic pollution.

The United Nations Environment Programme estimates that there are 46,000 pieces of plastic litter floating in every square mile of ocean.

Plastic bags are often mistakenly ingested by animals, clogging their intestines which results in death by starvation. Other animals or birds become entangled in plastic bags and drown or can’t fly as a result.

Even when they photo-degrade in landfill, the plastic from single-use bags never goes away, and toxic particles can enter the food chain when they are ingested by unsuspecting animals.

Greenpeace says that at least 267 marine species are known to have suffered from getting entangled in or ingesting marine debris. Nearly 90% of that debris is plastic.

Americans consume more than 10 billion paper bags per year. Approximately 14 million trees are cut down every year for paper bag production.

Most of the pulp used for paper shopping bags is virgin pulp, as it is considered stronger.

Paper production requires hundreds of thousands of gallons of water as well as toxic chemicals like sulphurous acid, which can lead to acid rain and water pollution.

plastic recycling

Easy Plastics to Recycle
The easiest and most common plastics to recycle are made of polyethylene terephthalate (PETE) and are assigned the number 1. Examples include soda and water bottles, medicine containers, and many other common consumer product containers. Once it has been processed by a recycling facility, PETE can become fiberfill for winter coats, sleeping bags and life jackets. It can also be used to make bean bags, rope, car bumpers, tennis ball felt, combs, cassette tapes, sails for boats, furniture and, of course, other plastic bottles.

Number 2 is reserved for high-density polyethylene plastics. These include heavier containers that hold laundry detergents and bleaches as well as milk, shampoo and motor oil. Plastic labeled with the number 2 is often recycled into toys, piping, plastic lumber and rope. Like plastic designated number 1, it is widely accepted at recycling centers.

Plastics Less Commonly Recycled
Polyvinyl chloride, commonly used in plastic pipes, shower curtains, medical tubing, vinyl dashboards, and even some baby bottle nipples, gets number 3. Like numbers 4 (wrapping films, grocery and sandwich bags, and other containers made of low-density polyethylene) and 5 (polypropylene containers used in Tupperware, among other products), few municipal recycling centers will accept it due to its very low rate of recyclability.

Another Useful Plastic to Recycle
Number 6 goes on polystyrene (Styrofoam) items such as coffee cups, disposable cutlery, meat trays, packing “peanuts” and insulation. It is widely accepted because it can be reprocessed into many items, including cassette tapes and rigid foam insulation.

Hardest Plastics to Recycle
Last, but far from least, are items crafted from various combinations of the aforementioned plastics or from unique plastic formulations not commonly used. Usually imprinted with a number 7 or nothing at all, these plastics are the most difficult to recycle and, as such, are seldom collected or recycled. More ambitious consumers can feel free to return such items to the product manufacturers to avoid contributing to the local waste stream, and instead put the burden on the makers to recycle or dispose of the items properly.

history of plastic

The First Man-Made Plastic - Parkesine

The first man-made plastic was created by Alexander Parkes who publicly demonstrated it at the 1862 Great International Exhibition in London.
The material called Parkesine was an organic material derived from cellulose that once heated could be molded, and retained its shape when cooled.

Celluloid

• Celluloid is derived from cellulose and alcoholized camphor. John Wesley Hyatt invented celluloid as a substitute for the ivory in billiard balls in 1868. 
• He first tried using collodion a natural substance, after spilling a bottle of it and discovering that the material dried into a tough and flexible film. 
• However, the material was not strong enough to be used as a billiard ball, until the addition of camphor, a derivative of the laurel tree. 
• The new celluloid could be molded with heat and pressure into a durable shape.
• Besides billiard balls, celluloid became famous as the first flexible photographic film used for still photography and motion pictures. 
• John Wesley Hyatt created celluloid in a strip format for movie film. 
• By 1900, movie film was an exploding market for celluloid.

Leo Hendrik Baekeland - Bakelite

• Leo Hendrik Baekeland was born in Ghent, Belgium, in 1863. 
• He immigrated to the United States in 1889. His first major invention was Velox, a photographic printing paper that could be developed under artificial light.
• He then started his own laboratory in Yonkers, New York, where he invented Bakelite in 1907, a synthetic substitute for the shellac used in electronic insulation.
• Bakelite was made by mixing Carbolic Acid with Formaldehyde, it is considered the first plastic. 
• In 1909, Bakelite was introduced to the general public at a chemical conference.
• Baekeland founded the General Bakelite Corp. 
• In 1944, Baekeland died at the age of eighty years in Beacon, N.Y.
• Bakerlite was used to manufacture everything form telephone handsets or costume jewelry for example as well as engine parts and insulation for electronics.

Leo Hendrik Baekeland 
Born Nov 14 1863 - Died Feb 23 1944 


Method of Making Insoluble Products of Phenol and Formaldehyde
Bakelite
Patent Number(s) 942,699


Inducted 1978


Leo Hendrik Baekeland is cited for his research in electric insulation, synthetic resins, and plastics. Using money from his first invention, Velox photographic paper, he established a laboratory, where he synthesized 'Bakelite,' a nonflammable material that was cheaper and more versatile than other known plastics.

Invention Impact

Bakelite

Bakelite has since been used in everything from engine parts to jewelry to electronics.

Inventor Bio

• Born in Ghent, Belgium, Baekeland graduated with a B.S. in chemistry from the University of Ghent in 1882 and a doctoral degree in 1884.
•  He was awarded honorary degrees from theUniversity of Pittsburgh and the University of Edinburgh. Baekeland was a professor of chemistry at the University of Ghent from 1882 to 1889 and was a professor of chemistry and physics at the Government Higher Normal School of Science, Bruges, Belgium, from 1885 to 1887.
•  In 1893 he founded Nepera Chemical Company, which he operated until 1899. He was president of the Bakelite Corp. from 1910 to 1939.
•  Baekeland was a member of the U.S. Naval Consulting Board and the U.S. Nitrate Supply Commission, chairman of the committee on patents of the National Research Council, trustee of the Institute of International Education, and a member of the advisory board of the Chemical Division of the U.S. Department of Commerce. 
• In the opening scene of The Graduate, Benjamin Braddock (played by a young Dustin Hoffman) is awkwardly working an affluent Southern California crowd at a graduation party arranged for him by his parents when a family friend offers one of the century's most famous pieces of cinematic advice:
•  "I just want to say one word to you. Just one word: plastics."
• Millions of moviegoers winced and smiled. The scene neatly captured their own late-'60s ambivalence toward the ever more synthetic landscape of their times.
•  They loved their cheap, easy-to-clean Formica countertops, but envied--and longed for--the authentic touch and timelessness of marble and wood.
•  The chord struck by that line in The Graduate underscored how much had happened in the six decades since the summer of 1907, when Leo Hendrik Baekeland made the laboratory breakthrough that would change the stuff our world is made of.
• A Belgian-born chemist-entrepreneur, Baekeland had a knack for spotting profitable opportunities. He scored his first success in the 1890s with his invention of Velox, an improved photographic paper that freed photographers from having to use sunlight for developing images. 
• With Velox, they could rely on artificial light, which at the time usually meant gaslight but soon came to mean electric.
•  It was a far more dependable and convenient way to work. 
• In 1899 George Eastman, whose cameras and developing services would make photography a household activity, bought full rights to Velox for the then astonishing sum of $1 million.
• With that windfall, Baekeland, his wife Celine (known as "Bonbon") and two children moved to Snug Rock, a palatial estate north of Yonkers, N.Y., overlooking the Hudson River. 
• There, in a barn he converted into a lab, he began foraging for his next big hit.
•  It wasn't long before the burgeoning electrical industry seemed to say just one word to him: insulators.
• The initial tease for Baekeland--"Doc Baekeland" to many--was the rising cost of shellac. For centuries, the resinous secretions that Laccifer lacca beetles deposited on trees had provided a cottage industry in southern Asia, where peasants heated and filtered it to produce a varnish for coating and preserving wood products. Shellac also happened to be an effective electrical insulator.
•  Early electrical workers used it as a coating to insulate coils, and molded it into stand-alone insulators by pressing together layers of shellac-impregnated paper.
• When electrification began in earnest in the first years of the century, demand for shellac soon outstripped supply. Baekeland recognized a killer ap when he saw one. 
• If only he could come up with a synthetic substitute for shellac.
• Others nearly beat him to it. As early as 1872, German chemist Adolf von Baeyer was investigating the recalcitrant residue that gathered in the bottom of glassware that had been host to reactions between phenol (a turpentine-like solvent distilled from coal tar, which the gas-lighting industry produced in bulk) and formaldehyde (an embalming fluid distilled from wood alcohol).
•  Von Baeyer set his sights on new synthetic dyes, however, not insulators. To him, the ugly, insoluble gunk in his glassware was a sign of a dead end.
• To Baekeland and others aiming to find commercial opportunities in the nascent electrical industry, that gunk was a signpost pointing toward something great. 
• The challenge for Baekeland and his rivals was to find some set of conditions--some slippery ratio of ingredients and heat and pressure--that would yield a more workable, shellac-like substance. Ideally it would be something that would dissolve in solvents to make insulating varnishes and yet be as moldable as rubber. Starting around 1904, Baekeland and an assistant began their search
• . Three years later, after filling laboratory books with page after page of failed experiments, Baekeland finally developed a material that he dubbed in his notebooks "Bakelite.
• " The key turned out to be his "bakelizer," a heavy iron vessel that was part pressure cooker and part basement boiler. 
• With it, he was able to control the formaldehyde-phenol reaction with more finesse than had anyone before him.
• Initial heating of the phenol and formaldehyde (in the presence of an acid or base to get the reaction going) produced a shellac-like liquid good for coating surfaces like a varnish.
•  Further heating turned the liquid into a pasty, gummier goo. 
• And when Baekeland put this stuff into the bakelizer, he was rewarded with a hard, translucent, infinitely moldable substance. 

plastic.

• He filed patent applications and soon began leaking word of his invention to other chemists.
•  In 1909 Baekeland unveiled the world's first fully synthetic plastic at a meeting of the New York chapter of the American Chemical Society. 
• Would-be customers discovered it could be fashioned into molded insulation, valve parts, pipe stems, billiard balls, knobs, buttons, knife handles and all manner of items.
• It was 20th century alchemy. From something as vile as coal tar came a remarkably versatile substance. It wasn't the first plastic, however.
•  Celluloid had been commercially available for decades as a substitute for tortoise-shell, horn, bone and other materials. But celluloid, which had developed a reputation as a cheap mimic of better traditional materials, was derived from chemically treated cotton and other cellulose-containing vegetable matter. Bakelite was lab-made through and through. It was 100% synthetic.
• Baekeland founded the General Bakelite Corp. to both make and license the manufacture of Bakelite. Competitors soon marketed knockoffs--most notably Redmanol and Condensite, which Thomas Edison used in a failed attempt to dominate the nascent recording industry with "unbreakable" phonograph disks. The presence of inauthentic Bakelite out there led to an early 20th century version of the "Intel Inside" logo. 
• Items made with the real thing carried a "tag of genuineness" bearing the Bakelite name.
•  Following drawn-out patent wars, Baekeland negotiated a merger with his rivals that put him at the helm of a veritable Bakelite empire.
• Bakelite became so visible in so many places that the company advertised it as "the material of a thousand uses
• " It became the stuff of everything from cigar holders and rosary beads to radio housings, distributor caps and telephone casings.
•  A 1924 TIME cover story on Baekeland reported that those familiar with Bakelite's potential "claim that in a few years it will be embodied in every mechanical facility of modern civilization."