Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization

by Ed Conway

Polyethylene isn’t the only plastic—indeed it’s one of five main families of human-made polymer. There is polystyrene, famed for its puffy packaging foam but equally capable of being moulded into a hard, clear plastic. There is vinyl—polyvinyl chloride—from which you can make hard pipes or soft shower curtains. There is nylon, famed for its silky stockings but just as easily moulded into hard machine screws. There is polypropylene, flexible enough to be used as the lid of a flip-top bottle but hard enough to be formed into furniture. There are also thermosetting materials like epoxy resin, most familiar to us as a glue but even more important as a binding matrix that helps carbon fibre and fibreglass set into ultra-hard materials. Thermosetting plastics have to be heated, cured, to adopt their chemical form while thermoplastics, which comprise most of today’s plastics, do not. Nor does it end there: there are 15 other categories of synthetic polymer, as well as tens of thousands of sub-categories—all materials the world had literally never seen before.