In recent years, the multifaceted issues around plastics in society have been widely reported in various media. One high profile example was in an episode of the BBC documentary series Blue Planet 2 (‘Our Blue Planet’), where Sir David Attenborough examines the impact of human life on life in the ocean, and especially the damage done by discarded plastic waste.
If you're interested, you can find out more about Blue Planet 2 and Blue Planet Live on our dedicated pages:
Despite this, it should be remembered that scientific knowledge does not stand still, and there is some positive news in this field of research. For instance, Austin et al. (2018) reported a novel enzyme that could degrade the most common type of polyester – so-called polyethylene terephthalate, or PET. As this course explores how scientific research is carried out and reported, we will now consider the science of this group of materials, which have become integral to our everyday lives.
Plastics are some of the most useful materials on Earth. They are almost entirely man-made, and the world around us would look very different without them. But they can also present challenges to the environment and human health. For example, there is growing concern about plastic materials (Eriksen et al., 2014) and microplastics (Vandermeersch et al., 2015; Welden and Cowie, 2017) in the oceans, and consequently the food chain. Therefore, anyone who is interested in science – from the fundamentals of chemistry, or the properties of materials, to human health and the future of the planet – needs to take an interest in plastics!
The first truly artificial synthetic plastic, Bakelite™, was developed in 1907 and since then, many more plastics have been introduced (Thompson et al., 2009). Today’s plastics are everyday materials, but they represent a great many inventions by a huge number of scientists from a number of disciplines.
If you look up plastic on the Oxford Dictionaries website (2018), the entry returned is:
A synthetic material made from a wide range of organic polymers such as polyethylene, PVC, nylon, etc., that can be moulded into shape while soft, and then set into a rigid or slightly elastic form.
Additionally, the entry for a bioplastic is:
A type of biodegradable plastic derived from biological substances rather than petroleum.
And microplastics are:
Extremely small pieces of plastic debris in the environment resulting from the disposal and breakdown of consumer products and industrial waste.
Scientific research into plastics and their many applications are ongoing, with many thousands of papers published on the subject each year. Exciting new applications appear daily, such as advances in 3D printing with plastics (Figure 1), novel antibacterial plastics and the development of new bioplastics that are not derived from petroleum.
The contemporary topic of plastics in society involves many multidisciplinary current research issues. These issues arise during their production, use, disposal and the development of materials with novel properties. For example, research teams are exploring concepts such as:
Allow about 5 minutes
Try to identify ten items that you regularly use in everyday life that comprise a significant amount of plastic.
Your list might include, for example:
Plastics are also ubiquitous in many workplace environments. For example, if you were working in a laboratory, it’s likely your list would include the following (some of these are shown in Figure 2):
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