Illustrating Plastic Production and End-of-Life Plastic Treatment with Interlocking Building Blocks

• Stephan Enthaler ^[1]
  1. [1] University of Hamburg

     University of Hamburg

     Hamburg, Freie und Hansestadt, Alemania

     
• Localización: Journal of chemical education, ISSN 0021-9584, Vol. 94, Nº 11, 2017, págs. 1746-1751
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Plastics are essential materials of our current society with countless applications that make the current way of living without plastics hardly imaginable. After the plastics have fulfilled their obligations, huge amounts of end-of-life plastics are generated that require some treatment such as reuse, repurposing, mechanical or chemical recycling, or disposal in a landfill. An approach based on interlocking building blocks is used to explain the life cycle of plastics from their production from monomers through the different treatments of end-of-life-plastics. Importantly, the proposed concept can be useful for a public audience with little knowledge of chemistry.