KNOW YOUR PLASTIC WITH CORONA EP. 3

Tuning “naught, no thanks” and turning your nose up to a plastic straw is a noble contribution to global efforts to combat our single-use plastic addiction‚ but what else? Are you chugging that flat white artisanal coffee with its single-use lid? Are you separating your plastic and making sure it gets into a recycling stream? Do you forgo products packaged in plastic which can’t be recycled? “Everyone is getting emotional about all the plastic in our oceans‚ as we should‚ but most of us have blood on our hands in terms of the poor choices we make as consumers.” – Chandru Wadhwani‚ MD of major plastics recycling company Extrupet. So let’s talk plastic!   Polymers Plastics, also called polymers, come in to fruition by linking klein building blocks, or unit cells. Those cells, or what dudes with white coats call monomers, are a mash-up of atoms derived from natural products or by the synthesis of primary chemicals by way of oil, natural gas, or coal. Where polyethylene is concerned, the repeat unit can be as simple as one carbon atom coupled with two hydrogen atoms. Whereas other plastics, such as nylons, the repeat unit can involve upwards of 38 atoms, quite […]