🚀 Inventions and machines 🧪 Materials and safety

Plastic

📖 In short

Plastic is a man-made material that can be shaped into any form we like. We make toys, boxes, bottles, bags and parts of computers and cars from it. Some plastic is hard and strong, some soft and bendy, and some clear like glass.

🤩 Did you know?

Most plastic parts harden in their molds in 10 to 30 seconds.
Baekeland patented Bakelite in 1909.
A plastic bottle can last hundreds of years in the sea.
Plastic bottles carry a small number showing their type for recycling.

🔎 Find out more

🌟 Where does it come from?

Most plastic is made from oil and gas. In factories small molecules are joined together into very long chains, making a new material: plastic.

🔍 How is it shaped?

Plastic is heated until it's soft, then pumped into molds shaped like the toy or box, and left to cool for a few seconds so it hardens in the right shape.

💡 The first plastic

More than a hundred years ago the scientist Baekeland made one of the first plastics and called it “Bakelite”, and old telephones and radios were made from it.

🎯 The plastic problem

Plastic takes hundreds of years to break down in nature, so it pollutes land and seas and harms animals. That's why we use cloth bags, recycle plastic and don't throw it away outdoors.