Polymer Engineering - Developing or Improving Plastic Products- Are Plastics Boon or Bane?

Abstract

Plastics have advantages and disadvantages in properties like every other material section i.e. wood, metals, aluminum, ceramics. A boon is the high flexibility with plastics to create each desired property for each single application. But this is exactly also the bane. The result are the 5 Billon tons of plastic worldwide everywhere on earth. The diversity of plastic solutions is enormous. This makes reuse of it almost impossible. Compared with no economic value of used plastic the significance for Consumers and companies is almost zero. We need a common strength to solve this problem. And we need true facts from scientists and experts to help consumers make the wright decision under technical, economical, ecological and social aspects. This is shown in detail using a plastic tote bag versus a fiber tote bag.