---

Plastic Products have many uses in today's society, including some which are considered indispensable. However there is a down side to plastic: One third of all plastic is used for items with a lifespan of less than one year and very little plastic is recycled. For example in San Francisco less than 2% of the 40,000 Metric Tons of plastic they use every year is recycled (see the October 2005 Forbes article, Junk Into Money). There are 200 types of different plastic resins but most plastic consumer products fall into one of six categories.

Plastics have developed an amazing presence in our lives. From the most commonplace tasks to our most unusual needs plastics increasingly have provided the performance in products that consumers want. Just consider it a moment; if you woke up tomorrow and there were no plastics you would be in for quite a shock. From your toothbrush to your Tylenol, life would be much more expensive and much less comfortable. And many of the conveniences you had come to take for granted would be gone entirely. Mostly, though, you would be surprised at the sheer numbers of products that had vanished -- things you had never thought of as being plastic. That's because in just a few decades consumers have come to consider the extraordinary properties of plastics as nothing out of the ordinary. Plastics' popularity and wide usage can be attributed to one basic fact: Because of their range of properties and design technologies, plastics offer consumer benefits unsurpassed by other materials. Let's take a look at the different types of plastics, usually referred to as "resins," and see how they are made and used.

Plastics generally are organic high polymers (i.e., they consist of large chainlike molecules containing carbon) that are formed in a plastic state either during or after their transition from a small-molecule chemical to a solid material. Stated very simply, the large chainlike molecules are formed by hooking together short-chain molecules of chemicals (monomers: mono = one, mer = unit) in a reaction known as polymerization (poly = many). When units of a single monomer are hooked together, the resulting plastic is a homopolymer, such as polyethylene, which is made from the ethylene monomer. When more than one monomer is included in the process, for example, ethylene and propylene, the resulting plastic is a copolymer

What do these numbers mean?

The society for the Plastics Industry came up with a labeling system for plastics a number of years ago. This system, which used the numbers from 1 to 7 (7 is used for anything that doesn't fall into the 6 common categories) surrounded by recycling arrows, was designed to identify the different types of plastic resins so that they could be more easily recycled when recycling systems came into place. The six common resins are :

1. 1.Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET);
   
2. 2.High Density Polyethylene (HDPE);
   
3. 3.Polyvinyl Chloride (PVC);
   
4. 4.Low Density Polyethylene (LDPE);
   
5. 5.Polypropylene (PP);
   
6. 6.Polystyrene (PS); and others
   

The plastic Types more clearly defined as:

Thermosets and Thermoplastics

---

BACK TO TOP | ITEMS ON SALE | CONTACT US