How are plastics manufactured?

Question

I have always been told that plastic is a product of petroleum! How in the heck does oil become the solid plastic used in everything?

Answer 1

Well, I am a chemist. This is a good question. Everything that is carbon based usually comes from the ground as crude oil and gets boiled off in a distillation column, usually the heaviest stuff is the tar used in roads. Anyways, the simplest is polyethylene. How it is made is unique, you need lots of heat and lots of pressure, sometimes up to about 10000psi. This takes the "ethylene" molecule and makes the chain to together called monomers ( -CH2- ). Plastic is the way it is because there is literally thousands of these monomer chains linked together in long strands to form the plastic that we use and see. Depending on what you add to these plastics you can make it flame proof, you can make it into elastic form like elastics for example, in this case, the molecules bounce back to were they were when they were originally formed after stretching them. You can add colors, etc. Basically almost everything that is carbon based comes from Crude oil from an oil refinery, they don't just make fuel for gas and such, they make MANY things. Hope this helps.

Wee Man.

Answer 2

All plastics are polymers. Polymers are made up of thousands of monomer units - the simplest is polyethylene, which is just a long chain of -CH2- groups.

They're said to be made from petroleum because you have to have a carbon source in the first place to make the polymers. Many organic compounds are derived from petroleum, because it's far easier to refine petroleum than it is to modify elemental carbon

Answer 3

Plastics are polymers - typical plastic products are either polyethylene (polymer of ethylene) or polypropylene (polymer of propylene).

A typical refinery for petroleum will involve a catalytic operation called FCC (fluid catalytic cracking). This reaction breaks the large organic molecules (the oily stuff) into smaller molecules like gasoline and lighter gases like ethylene. Ethylene and Propylene are byproducts of petroleum refining.