Plastics: A Debutante Industry

The plastics industry, as it is now called, has survived its infancy and grown in size and importance until its emancipation from the chemical industry must be recognized. The latter industry has become actually a family of industries, including such mature members as fertilizers, vegetable oils, and explosives, as well as plastics. A complete separation of plastics from chemicals, however, is not easy to comprehend, either descriptively or statistically, due first to the lack of a single differentiating characteristic, and second, to the extensive occurrence of joint products, processes and materials. The data now available, coming as they do from many sources, are not always entirely comparable or homogeneous. However, statistics have been published by the Bureau of the Census since 1939, and the magazine Modern Plastics has been established to serve as a house organ for the industry. The word means soft and pliable, or, capable of being shaped or molded. Under such a broad definition many materials could be properly included, for example, bread dough, hot metal or stiff mud. However, it was the ease with which certain materials could be molded or pressed into shapes of all kinds that appeared to be their most valuable attribute and consequently served to give them their present name. From a more scientific standpoint, the characteristics, which taken together denote the plastics of modern industry, are as follows: (1) synthetically produced; (2) composed mainly of a resin or a similar organic binder; (3) liquified or plastic at some stage in its manufacture; (4) rigid or semi-rigid when used; and (5) made in its final stage through a rearrangement of its molecules by polymerization or condensation.' Polymerization is the process of joining together a number of single molecules of one or more substances to form larger molecules of chain structure, without the formation of any other product. When another product is formed, the process is called condensation. Until about 1935, condensation was the method most widely used but since that time polymerization has predominated.2 A resin, nature's nearest approach to a plastic, is defined as a solid or semi-solid organic compound having no definite melting point and no tendency to crystallize. Resins are now produced synthetically, as plastic binders, with qualities more desirable than those produced by nature. The plastic industry may be regarded, therefore, as that group of companies