Jan. 11, 2023
Do you know about plastics? ♻️
Did you know? In this episode we are going to talk about plastic. We are going to look at how plastic is made, why it is so useful but also so bad for the environment. We are going to talk about some different types of plastic and see what we can do to help make using plastic better for the environment.
Sleep Tight!, Sheryl & Clark
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Sleep Tight Science is an engaging bedtime show for the whole family that answers the questions kids have about science. Have an interesting science topic you would like featured? Send us an email at hello@sleeptightscience.com and we may feature it in an upcoming show.
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Transcript
00:00:00
Speaker 1: You're listening to sleep Tight Science. Did you know that it takes about four hundred and fifty years for one plastic bottle to break down in the ground. What an estimated thirteen billion plastic bottles are disposed of each year? Hello, friends, and welcome back to sleep Tight Science, a bedtime show that answers your questions about science. If you look around you right now, whether in bed or anywhere else, what objects do you see nearby? I'm in our recording booth, so there aren't many objects around me, but even these few things that are are made of plastic. Plastics are amazing materials that play a significant role in our lives. They are man made and do not spoil like some natural materials do. We microwave our food and plastic containers. We carry plastic water bottles to school and on hikes and biking trips. We use them to make all kinds of things, from furniture to toys. There are hundreds of different kinds of plastics, in different colors and with different properties, from strong and hard to soft and flexi. They offer convenience, flexibility, and strength. The bad news is that they can sometimes release harmful toxins into our food, water, and environment. In this episode, we will learn about plastic and try to answer some of the questions you our listeners, have submitted about these materials. Before we answer some of the questions, let's learn some basic facts first. What is plastic. Plastic is a material made by people that can be formed into almost any shape. Most plastics are strong, long lasting, and lightweight. They resist damage by water, heat, chemicals, and electricity. Plastics can be easily stretched or molded into shape. Most plastics are made from chemicals derived or taken from oil, natural gas, or coal. Heating these chemicals causes them to break down into molecules. Molecules are groups of two or more atoms, which are the tiny building blocks of everything. Scientists then join these molecules into chains. These chains make up plastic. Different combinations of molecules form different kinds of plastic. Many familiar objects, from casings for electrical goods like radios, to bags, drink containers, toys, and helmets are made from different types of plastics. Like combs and toothbrushes are made from molding plastic. The bristles of toothbrushes are often made from nylon fibers. Plastics are a form of polymer. In eighteen sixty nine, John Wesley Hyatt, a US inventor, made the first plastic. He called it celluloid because he made it from a plant material called cellulose, a naturally occurring polymer. Bacolite was the first completely synthetic plastic, invented in nineteen o seven by US chemist Leobakeland. Bakeland named the new material bacolite. Since then, hundreds of plastics have been developed. The wide range of uses for plastics stems from their properties. They can be rigid or flexible, and be colored, shaped, and formed in many ways. Plastics are also good electrical insulators and are very resistant to chemical deterioration. Plastics do not all behave in the same way when they are heated. Some called thermoplastics, soften when they are heated. Other plastics, called thermo sets, become harder when they are heated. Once they have set during manufacturing, they cannot be reshaped. Electric plugs are made of thermo sets, which is why they do not melt if the wires inside them overheat. Plastics are very useful, but they can also cause many environmental problems. The chemical resistance of plastic is a good property for most uses. Still, that same resistance becomes a problem in garbage landfills. The bacteria that cause wood, paper, and natural fibers to biodegrade or rot cannot break down most plastics. As a result, plastic materials remain unchanged in landfills. A great deal of plastic waste also winds up in the oceans, where it can hurt animals Because they do not break down. Things like plastic bags, bottles, and fishing lines collect in large areas of the ocean. Sea turtles and other animals may eat this plastic. The animals can also be hurt when plastic fishing line gets wrapped around their bodies. Scientists are developing biodegradable plastics, some of them based on plant materials. However, recycling as much plastic as possible is considered the most practical way to avoid the build up of plastics in landfill sites. Recycled plastic can be turned into clothing, outdoor furniture, playground equipment, and more. How are plastics made. Let's look at how we could make a single use plastic bottle to understand how plastics are made. Single use plastics are meant to be used once and disposed of right away. Bottles, straws, and shopping bags are all single use plastics. When it comes to a plastic bottle, it all starts with oil. Oil is usually drilled from areas under the ground called reservoirs. To get through it, you drill through rock. Metal pipes transport the oil up to massive oil carriers. The carriers deliver the oil to the refinery. Oil is distilled and processed at a refinery into various petroleum products, including the oil used to make polyethylene terophylate or pet plastic. This is the plastic used to make plastic bottles. Pet Plastic is thermoplastic which can soften when heated and harden when cooled to form different shapes for different containers. Plastic is from the Greek word plastics, which means to mold. Extracting oil has some severe environmental impacts. To make our plastic bottle, we first need to combine the two raw materials of pet ethylene glycoal from oil plus terophilic acid with heat and a catalyst, which is a substance to speed up the chemical reaction to make a polymer chain. Afterwards, we need to cool it quickly and cut it into small pellets. Then we could drop our pellets into a plastic injection machine. Then the heat from the plastic injection machine, set at about three hundred and fifteen degrees celsius or six hundred degrees fahrenheit, melts our pellets into a thick guy plastic mixture. We then use high pressure to shoot our guy mixture into molds. These shapes harden very quickly. A machine will then blow hot air into the mixture to expand our bottle to its final size. We then cool them with water and apply some packaging. Unfortunately, most plastic bottles we create are not recycled and end up in the environment, where they do a lot of harm. We will talk more about these environmental problems in a bit, but first let's look at some of the benefits of using plastics. The benefits of plastic. There is little doubt that plastic has profoundly affected the types of products we use in our lives. There's also little doubt that certain single use plastics are bad for the environment, and that we could all use less plastic. Finding a few points to answer this question took more work than we had hoped, as most of the sources were from the plastics industry, which, as you might guess, are biased or could be one sided. The problem of information bias being favorable towards one outcome or opinion will be a problem you'd discover when you do your own research in school. So what are some of the benefits of plastic as a material. Plastics can be durable and resistant to all kinds of outside adverse factors. For instance, they are resistant to heavy rain storms and other types of weather. Plastics can be light weight, light weight and strong. Materials allow for all kinds of uses. Think of all the plastic in your school bag and how much heavier it might be without it. Plastic has a long lifespan. Many of our plastic products also have long lifespans. Of course, their long lifespans are part of the problem when they are discarded and not recycled. Plastic is reusable. It can be melted down and reshaped over and over again. Recycling plastic means less need to manufacture new materials and less waste in our landfills. Plastics allow for a flexible shape and design not easily attained using other materials. Plastics can protect our heads in the form of helmets. They keep us safer in our cars in the forms of seatbelts, fuel tanks, windscreens, and air bags. Plastic also helps to insulate our homes and make them more energy efficient. Window trims, front door frames, and cavity wall insulation materials are generally made from plastic. So what's the problem with plastics? Plastics are made from fossil fuels, which are finite and environmentally damaging resources. The extraction and transportation of oil creates all kinds of problems from leaks and pipelines, spills in the ocean, and the process of extraction itself. The main issue with plastics is that, by design, they are incredibly durable or long lasting. Some plastics can take up to one thousand years to biodgrade. U use plastics are therefore a big problem. So what happens is that single use plastics are produced and used worldwide every day. This, hand in hand with improper disposal, non recycling and littering, produce plastic pollution on a global scale. Globally, we use four million plastic bags a year. We use them for an average of twelve minutes, but they take five hundred plus years to decompose In a landfill. They were first introduced to supermarkets in nineteen seventy seven, so that first bag may be gone by the year twenty four to seventy seven. Most plastic bags won't decompose or break down easily because the polymers in them are not recognized as food by microorganisms, and so they won't eat them. Today, plastic pollution is the most prevalent issue affecting the marine environment. There are five point twenty five trillion pieces of plastic trash in our oceans. This plastic waste collects in huge gyers or spiraling currents. Rotating currants and powerful winds converge in the area around gyers and carry the pieces around the globe. The plastic waste doesn't break down, but shreds into smaller pieces. Fish and birds mistake rice sized fragments for food and can die from eating them. As the rate of plastic production has rapidly increased and continues to rise, it's becoming almost impossible to implement or carry out proper disposal strategies that match the rate of production and waste. Low recycling rates and poor waste collection systems are among the most significant contributors to plastic pollution. How does plastic pollution affect us if the fish we eat contain plastic, what danger does this pose to humans? Also, plastic chemicals like PCBs polychlorinated bifenols are absorbed by sea water. These industrial chemicals have been linked to many dangerous human diseases. How can you reduce your usage of plastics? There are a few things that we can all do to help reduce our usage of plastic. We use plastic daily from plastic shopping bags, plastic straws, and water bottles, and they all produce plastic pollution. Therefore, steps can be taken to reduce plastic pollution by swapping these single use plastic products or reusable versions. Use a reusable bag instead of a plastic grocery bag. Instead of using plastic bags. To carry your lunch, you can use a Bento box lunchbox. Carry your drinks in a reusable bottle. You could use a stainless steel or bamboo straw instead of plastic straws. You can also ensure waste is disposed of correctly in an effective way to tackle plastic pollution. Checking which waste items can be recycled where you live and which cannot be is a really important step to take in reducing plastic pollution. Our schools have containers specifically for recycling. Does your school. Another way to help is to not litter. It's good practice to never leave your garbage behind wherever you go, dispose of it in a bin where you can. If there are no bins nearby, you can keep your garbage with you until you find one. Using reusable containers and utensils, picking up your garbage and putting plastics in their proper place are just a few ways to reduce plastic pollution. Can you think of other ways? Fun and not so fun? Facts? An estimated fourteen billion pounds of trash, much of it plastic, is dumped into the world's oceans yearly. Plastic pollution can be found on every beach in the world. Eleven percent of household waste is plastic, forty percent is plastic bottles. Around the world, nearly a million plastic beverage bottles are sold every minute. Every year. We make enough plastic film to shrink wrap the state of Texas. A species of fungus from the Amazon feeds on and can live off of plastic. Like sewage and food waste, plastic waste contains energy. Two, that plastic bottle still has potential as an energy source thanks to the oil used to make it. Recycling plastic saves twice as much energy then burning it in an incinerator. With ecobricks, empty plastic bottles are filled with clean, dried and single use plastics that are stuffed inside up to the top. This makes them strong and resistant and like a brick, which can then serve as reusable building blocks for many purposes like building tables, beds, stages, and even walls. In South Africa, even a school was built from eco bricks. About ninety thousand tons of pig p is released daily from the billions of pigs worldwide. A chemical in the pig's pea called urea can be collected and used as a replacement for petroleum. Pig pa is dumped into storage tanks that can leak overflow and pollute nearby ground and water. Disposing of it is hazardous and expensive when used for plastic, though pig pea can be filtered immediately, the environmental impact and costs are much less than with fossil fuel plastics. Last, but not least, the most shocking is that nearly every piece of plastic ever made still exists today. In this episode, we learned about plastics. We talked about what is plastic, how it is made, and why it is so useful but also bad for the environment. So many things that we use each day are made out of plastic. We also talked about some of the problems caused by plastic and some of the ways that we can help to recycle and use these plastics in new ways that are better for the environment. This episode was made with questions from Dylan Vanzo. I'd like to say thank you to Jace Oros, Andrew and Oliver. We hope to have a chance to use your ideas in future episodes. If you'd like to send us your questions, please send them to Hello at sleep tightscience dot com.
Speaker 1: You're listening to sleep Tight Science. Did you know that it takes about four hundred and fifty years for one plastic bottle to break down in the ground. What an estimated thirteen billion plastic bottles are disposed of each year? Hello, friends, and welcome back to sleep Tight Science, a bedtime show that answers your questions about science. If you look around you right now, whether in bed or anywhere else, what objects do you see nearby? I'm in our recording booth, so there aren't many objects around me, but even these few things that are are made of plastic. Plastics are amazing materials that play a significant role in our lives. They are man made and do not spoil like some natural materials do. We microwave our food and plastic containers. We carry plastic water bottles to school and on hikes and biking trips. We use them to make all kinds of things, from furniture to toys. There are hundreds of different kinds of plastics, in different colors and with different properties, from strong and hard to soft and flexi. They offer convenience, flexibility, and strength. The bad news is that they can sometimes release harmful toxins into our food, water, and environment. In this episode, we will learn about plastic and try to answer some of the questions you our listeners, have submitted about these materials. Before we answer some of the questions, let's learn some basic facts first. What is plastic. Plastic is a material made by people that can be formed into almost any shape. Most plastics are strong, long lasting, and lightweight. They resist damage by water, heat, chemicals, and electricity. Plastics can be easily stretched or molded into shape. Most plastics are made from chemicals derived or taken from oil, natural gas, or coal. Heating these chemicals causes them to break down into molecules. Molecules are groups of two or more atoms, which are the tiny building blocks of everything. Scientists then join these molecules into chains. These chains make up plastic. Different combinations of molecules form different kinds of plastic. Many familiar objects, from casings for electrical goods like radios, to bags, drink containers, toys, and helmets are made from different types of plastics. Like combs and toothbrushes are made from molding plastic. The bristles of toothbrushes are often made from nylon fibers. Plastics are a form of polymer. In eighteen sixty nine, John Wesley Hyatt, a US inventor, made the first plastic. He called it celluloid because he made it from a plant material called cellulose, a naturally occurring polymer. Bacolite was the first completely synthetic plastic, invented in nineteen o seven by US chemist Leobakeland. Bakeland named the new material bacolite. Since then, hundreds of plastics have been developed. The wide range of uses for plastics stems from their properties. They can be rigid or flexible, and be colored, shaped, and formed in many ways. Plastics are also good electrical insulators and are very resistant to chemical deterioration. Plastics do not all behave in the same way when they are heated. Some called thermoplastics, soften when they are heated. Other plastics, called thermo sets, become harder when they are heated. Once they have set during manufacturing, they cannot be reshaped. Electric plugs are made of thermo sets, which is why they do not melt if the wires inside them overheat. Plastics are very useful, but they can also cause many environmental problems. The chemical resistance of plastic is a good property for most uses. Still, that same resistance becomes a problem in garbage landfills. The bacteria that cause wood, paper, and natural fibers to biodegrade or rot cannot break down most plastics. As a result, plastic materials remain unchanged in landfills. A great deal of plastic waste also winds up in the oceans, where it can hurt animals Because they do not break down. Things like plastic bags, bottles, and fishing lines collect in large areas of the ocean. Sea turtles and other animals may eat this plastic. The animals can also be hurt when plastic fishing line gets wrapped around their bodies. Scientists are developing biodegradable plastics, some of them based on plant materials. However, recycling as much plastic as possible is considered the most practical way to avoid the build up of plastics in landfill sites. Recycled plastic can be turned into clothing, outdoor furniture, playground equipment, and more. How are plastics made. Let's look at how we could make a single use plastic bottle to understand how plastics are made. Single use plastics are meant to be used once and disposed of right away. Bottles, straws, and shopping bags are all single use plastics. When it comes to a plastic bottle, it all starts with oil. Oil is usually drilled from areas under the ground called reservoirs. To get through it, you drill through rock. Metal pipes transport the oil up to massive oil carriers. The carriers deliver the oil to the refinery. Oil is distilled and processed at a refinery into various petroleum products, including the oil used to make polyethylene terophylate or pet plastic. This is the plastic used to make plastic bottles. Pet Plastic is thermoplastic which can soften when heated and harden when cooled to form different shapes for different containers. Plastic is from the Greek word plastics, which means to mold. Extracting oil has some severe environmental impacts. To make our plastic bottle, we first need to combine the two raw materials of pet ethylene glycoal from oil plus terophilic acid with heat and a catalyst, which is a substance to speed up the chemical reaction to make a polymer chain. Afterwards, we need to cool it quickly and cut it into small pellets. Then we could drop our pellets into a plastic injection machine. Then the heat from the plastic injection machine, set at about three hundred and fifteen degrees celsius or six hundred degrees fahrenheit, melts our pellets into a thick guy plastic mixture. We then use high pressure to shoot our guy mixture into molds. These shapes harden very quickly. A machine will then blow hot air into the mixture to expand our bottle to its final size. We then cool them with water and apply some packaging. Unfortunately, most plastic bottles we create are not recycled and end up in the environment, where they do a lot of harm. We will talk more about these environmental problems in a bit, but first let's look at some of the benefits of using plastics. The benefits of plastic. There is little doubt that plastic has profoundly affected the types of products we use in our lives. There's also little doubt that certain single use plastics are bad for the environment, and that we could all use less plastic. Finding a few points to answer this question took more work than we had hoped, as most of the sources were from the plastics industry, which, as you might guess, are biased or could be one sided. The problem of information bias being favorable towards one outcome or opinion will be a problem you'd discover when you do your own research in school. So what are some of the benefits of plastic as a material. Plastics can be durable and resistant to all kinds of outside adverse factors. For instance, they are resistant to heavy rain storms and other types of weather. Plastics can be light weight, light weight and strong. Materials allow for all kinds of uses. Think of all the plastic in your school bag and how much heavier it might be without it. Plastic has a long lifespan. Many of our plastic products also have long lifespans. Of course, their long lifespans are part of the problem when they are discarded and not recycled. Plastic is reusable. It can be melted down and reshaped over and over again. Recycling plastic means less need to manufacture new materials and less waste in our landfills. Plastics allow for a flexible shape and design not easily attained using other materials. Plastics can protect our heads in the form of helmets. They keep us safer in our cars in the forms of seatbelts, fuel tanks, windscreens, and air bags. Plastic also helps to insulate our homes and make them more energy efficient. Window trims, front door frames, and cavity wall insulation materials are generally made from plastic. So what's the problem with plastics? Plastics are made from fossil fuels, which are finite and environmentally damaging resources. The extraction and transportation of oil creates all kinds of problems from leaks and pipelines, spills in the ocean, and the process of extraction itself. The main issue with plastics is that, by design, they are incredibly durable or long lasting. Some plastics can take up to one thousand years to biodgrade. U use plastics are therefore a big problem. So what happens is that single use plastics are produced and used worldwide every day. This, hand in hand with improper disposal, non recycling and littering, produce plastic pollution on a global scale. Globally, we use four million plastic bags a year. We use them for an average of twelve minutes, but they take five hundred plus years to decompose In a landfill. They were first introduced to supermarkets in nineteen seventy seven, so that first bag may be gone by the year twenty four to seventy seven. Most plastic bags won't decompose or break down easily because the polymers in them are not recognized as food by microorganisms, and so they won't eat them. Today, plastic pollution is the most prevalent issue affecting the marine environment. There are five point twenty five trillion pieces of plastic trash in our oceans. This plastic waste collects in huge gyers or spiraling currents. Rotating currants and powerful winds converge in the area around gyers and carry the pieces around the globe. The plastic waste doesn't break down, but shreds into smaller pieces. Fish and birds mistake rice sized fragments for food and can die from eating them. As the rate of plastic production has rapidly increased and continues to rise, it's becoming almost impossible to implement or carry out proper disposal strategies that match the rate of production and waste. Low recycling rates and poor waste collection systems are among the most significant contributors to plastic pollution. How does plastic pollution affect us if the fish we eat contain plastic, what danger does this pose to humans? Also, plastic chemicals like PCBs polychlorinated bifenols are absorbed by sea water. These industrial chemicals have been linked to many dangerous human diseases. How can you reduce your usage of plastics? There are a few things that we can all do to help reduce our usage of plastic. We use plastic daily from plastic shopping bags, plastic straws, and water bottles, and they all produce plastic pollution. Therefore, steps can be taken to reduce plastic pollution by swapping these single use plastic products or reusable versions. Use a reusable bag instead of a plastic grocery bag. Instead of using plastic bags. To carry your lunch, you can use a Bento box lunchbox. Carry your drinks in a reusable bottle. You could use a stainless steel or bamboo straw instead of plastic straws. You can also ensure waste is disposed of correctly in an effective way to tackle plastic pollution. Checking which waste items can be recycled where you live and which cannot be is a really important step to take in reducing plastic pollution. Our schools have containers specifically for recycling. Does your school. Another way to help is to not litter. It's good practice to never leave your garbage behind wherever you go, dispose of it in a bin where you can. If there are no bins nearby, you can keep your garbage with you until you find one. Using reusable containers and utensils, picking up your garbage and putting plastics in their proper place are just a few ways to reduce plastic pollution. Can you think of other ways? Fun and not so fun? Facts? An estimated fourteen billion pounds of trash, much of it plastic, is dumped into the world's oceans yearly. Plastic pollution can be found on every beach in the world. Eleven percent of household waste is plastic, forty percent is plastic bottles. Around the world, nearly a million plastic beverage bottles are sold every minute. Every year. We make enough plastic film to shrink wrap the state of Texas. A species of fungus from the Amazon feeds on and can live off of plastic. Like sewage and food waste, plastic waste contains energy. Two, that plastic bottle still has potential as an energy source thanks to the oil used to make it. Recycling plastic saves twice as much energy then burning it in an incinerator. With ecobricks, empty plastic bottles are filled with clean, dried and single use plastics that are stuffed inside up to the top. This makes them strong and resistant and like a brick, which can then serve as reusable building blocks for many purposes like building tables, beds, stages, and even walls. In South Africa, even a school was built from eco bricks. About ninety thousand tons of pig p is released daily from the billions of pigs worldwide. A chemical in the pig's pea called urea can be collected and used as a replacement for petroleum. Pig pa is dumped into storage tanks that can leak overflow and pollute nearby ground and water. Disposing of it is hazardous and expensive when used for plastic, though pig pea can be filtered immediately, the environmental impact and costs are much less than with fossil fuel plastics. Last, but not least, the most shocking is that nearly every piece of plastic ever made still exists today. In this episode, we learned about plastics. We talked about what is plastic, how it is made, and why it is so useful but also bad for the environment. So many things that we use each day are made out of plastic. We also talked about some of the problems caused by plastic and some of the ways that we can help to recycle and use these plastics in new ways that are better for the environment. This episode was made with questions from Dylan Vanzo. I'd like to say thank you to Jace Oros, Andrew and Oliver. We hope to have a chance to use your ideas in future episodes. If you'd like to send us your questions, please send them to Hello at sleep tightscience dot com.