Where does the plastic come from?

The first fully synthetic plastic came from Belgian-American Leo Hendrick Baekeland, who registered a patent for phenolic plastic.

Baekeland, the son of a shoemaker and a maid, was born in Ghent on 1863. 1884, at the age of 2 1, Baekeland received his doctorate from Ghent university. At the age of 24, he became a professor of physics and chemistry at Bruges Teachers College. 1889 just married the daughter of a university tutor, and Baekeland won a travel scholarship to go to the United States to engage in chemical research.

Encouraged by Professor Columbia University, Baekeland stayed in the United States and worked for a photography supplier. This led him to invent Velox photographic paper a few years later, which can be developed in light, not in the sun. 1893, Baekeland resigned and established Nepera chemical company.

Under the impact of new products, Eastman Kodak, a photographic equipment manufacturer, can't stand it. 1898, after two negotiations, KeDafang bought the patent right of Velox photographic paper for 750,000 US dollars (equivalent to 2065438+2003150,000 US dollars). However, Kodak soon found that this formula didn't work, and Baekeland's answer was: This is normal. Inventors will omit one or two steps in patent documents to prevent infringement.

After digging the first bucket of gold, Baekeland bought a mansion overlooking the Hudson River in yonkers, near New York, transformed a barn into a fully equipped private laboratory, and cooperated with others to build an experimental factory in Brooklyn. At that time, the booming power industry included a huge market for insulating materials.

The first temptation Baekeland smelled was the soaring price of shellac, a natural insulating material that has been produced by cottage industries in South Asia for centuries. After investigation, Baekeland took finding a substitute for shellac as its first commercial goal.

At that time, chemists began to realize that many natural resins and fibers that can be used as coatings, adhesives and fabrics are polymers, that is, macromolecules with repetitive structures, and began to look for components and methods to synthesize polymers. The difference is that celluloid comes from chemically treated collodion and other plant materials containing cellulose, while phenolic plastic is the first completely synthetic plastic in the world.

Baekeland named it "Bakelite" after himself. Fortunately, his British colleague Sir James Swinburne filed a patent application only one day later, otherwise the English name of phenolic plastic might be "Swinburnet". 1909 On February 8th, Baekeland disclosed the plastic at a meeting of the American Chemical Society.

1945, one year after Baekeland's death, the annual output of plastics in the United States exceeded 400,000 tons, 1979, surpassing the representative of the industrial age-steel. In the exhibition of London Science Museum, Baekeland's great-grandson Xiu Calaque holds a urea-formaldehyde plastic mobile phone in one hand and a mobile phone made of biodegradable plastic in the other.

Extended data:

Plastics have a great influence on the environment in China. Therefore, China has adopted the means of plastic recycling to reduce the harm caused by plastics.

It is reported that waste plastic trading places have spread all over the country, and a number of large-scale trading distribution centers and processing gathering areas have been formed in plastic recycling. Mainly distributed in Guangdong, Zhejiang, Jiangsu, Shandong, Hebei, Liaoning and other provinces with relatively developed plastic processing industry.

Among them, Taizhou, Dongyang and Cixi in Zhejiang, Nanhai, Dong Fan and Shantou in Guangdong, Lianyungang, Xuzhou and Xinghua in Jiangsu, Wen 'an, Wang Du and Bazhou in Hebei, Linyi, Laizhou, Zibo and Dongying in Shandong, Anyang, Changge and He Jie in Henan, Wuhe in Anhui and other places, the market for recycling, processing and management of waste plastics is growing day by day.

As a new industry, the scale of waste plastics processing is growing, and the variety and output are also increasing. At present, there are a large number of similar processing sites and trading sites around major central cities in China, such as Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, Chongqing, Guangzhou, Wuhan, Nanjing, Xi, Taiyuan, Chengdu and Shenyang.

Generally speaking, there are more and more enterprises engaged in recycling and processing of waste plastics in China, but they are still mainly individual enterprises.

Baidu encyclopedia-plastic

Baidu encyclopedia-plastic recycling