Management Consultant, Business Unit Extrusion bei Leistritz SEA Pte Ltd & Director Sales, Solids And Fluids Engineers Pte Ltd
Returning to the Plastic Industry and recent independence, post WWII stories, I'd like to remain at this time. The invention of Plastic started in the very late 19th century while most plastic materials were developed around 1920-30. Major inventions belong to Du Pont, Hoechst, Dow, BASF, Bayer, but also ICI (Imperial Chemical Industries) who developed Polyethylene accidently during another experiment. One earlier pioneer was Leo Baekeland in the US who invented Bakelite in 1907. It was the 1st fully synthetic plastic material already named: 'material of thousand uses'. Plastic materials started to come into use during WWII (Du Pont's Nylon was used first as a new material for parachutes) and came into wide commercial applications afterwards. The entire worldwide Plastic production in 1950 was just 1.5 million ton!! With rapid developments since then, todays production is about 450 million ton and growing. Plastic materials are essential to our modern lifestyle. At the same time we must realize that it is still a very young industry of only 80 years. Considering this there is much more to look forward to and recent efforts in Recycling are parts of that development.
