WELCOME TO ELSALAM FOR PLASTIC

What are plastics?

We talk about "plastic" as though it's a single material, but there are in fact many different plastics. What they have in common is that they're plastic, which means they are soft and easy to turn into many different forms during manufacture. Plastics are (mostly) synthetic (human-made) materials, made from polymers, which are long molecules built around chains of carbon atoms, typically with hydrogen, oxygen, sulfur, and nitrogen filling in the spaces. You can think of a polymer as a big molecule made by repeating a small bit called a monomer over and over again; "poly" means many, so "polymer" is simply short for "many monomers." If you think of how a long coal train is made from many trucks coupled together, that's what polymers are like. The trucks are the monomers and the entire train, made from lots of identical trucks, is the polymer. Where a coal train might have a couple of dozen trucks, a polymer could be built from hundreds or even thousands of monomers. In other words, polymers typically have very large and heavy molecules.