Plastics of the future may be made from sulfur, not oil, putting waste to good use What has chemistr
Plastics of the future may be made from sulfur, not oil, putting waste to good use
What has chemistry ever done for me, you might ask? Just as Dustin Hoffman was told by one of his would-be mentors in The Graduate, one answer is plastics – one of the greatest chemical innovations of the 20th century.
Most plastic items are made of chemicals such as polyethylene (PET), polypropylene (PP), polyurethane, or polyvinylchloride (PVC) which are all derived from oil. These monomers are obtained industrially from the fractional distillation of crude oil, and polymerised in great quantities with catalysts in a process developed in the 1950s and 60s. Chemists Karl Ziegler and Giulio Natta shared the 1963 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their titanium catalyst process, which for cost-effectiveness has yet to be bettered.
So the industrial feedstocks and methods of manufacturing plastics have not changed significantly for more than 60 years. But the situation has: oil is harder to come by and (usually) more expensive, and environmental pressures are growing. If we want to keep plastics, we will need to find new ways of making them.
Both an important mineral for health as a solid but poisonous as a gas, sulfur usually conjures up vivid images of fire, volcanoes and, through its archaic name brimstone, even hell itself. But in fact sulfur is a waste product from many industrial processes and could be an alternative to oil from which to manufacture plastics.
