By Helmar Franz
Haitian Plastics Machinery Group Ltd.

I believe you count 100 years in plastics from the date back in 1907, when Leo Baekeland invented Bakelite, the first totally synthetic plastics material. But, in fact, the history of plastics is much older if you would consider plastics is what we say in German “kunststoffe” — plastics or synthetic material.

Some say it started in 1823, when Charles Mac Intosh first manufactured rain coats from a synthetic rubber/latex material. Some say it started 1860, when Alexander Parkes, on the basis of cellulose nitrate in Basel, Switzerland, found a new material that could be hard like ivory (his invention was used to replace ivory used to manufacture billiard balls, in order to save life of the elephants), could be transparent, could be flexible, sometimes water-resistant and could be machined like metal or press formed or rolled. He called it Parkesine, and it is the grandmother of more than a hundred families of polymers nowadays.

But the real first to invent synthetic plastics was a Benedictine monk in Augsburg, Germany in 1531, later joined by the chemist Bartolomäus Schobinger, who repeatedly heated and cooled cheese, producing a synthetic material on the basis of the lactic acid casein. It was hard like bone and transparent, and was used to manufacture plates and packaging, as well as decorations.

So many impressive inventions have driven the development of plastics. Alan Heeger, Alan G. MacDiarmid and Hideki Shirakawa won the Nobel Prize in 2000 for inventing electrographic/conducting plastics.

It is hard to say what was most important, but I would choose the invention of the German monk back in 1531 — this was remarkable. I choose this as well because it shows the largest challenge for the plastics industry as a whole — the use of natural resources. Nowadays, everybody is used to seeing oil as the resource used to make plastics, but it was not in the earlier days. The way for the future should be to find other natural resources to even enlarge the unique applications for plastics in all industries.

But before coming to the future, I would like to mention the most impressive developments in the machine industry, making the use of plastics possible and feasible in our daily life. Here I would like to mention the brothers Hehl, who formed the company Arburg and developed the first real injection molding machine, the Allrounder, as well as Reifenhäuser, which developed the first really usable extruder. These are really admirable pioneers. I am a little bit critical with regard to developing the injection molding process. It is too energy-consuming and not really economical, at least not as it has been presented so far. You may read more about my ideas, thoughts and concerns on this subject, if you want, in my article “Injection molding exhausted?” published in Kunststoffe magazine in October 2006.

Today inventions in every industry are unthinkable without the use of plastics.

In the future, I see the plastics industry facing a challenge because of resource issues. Since the first oil crisis in 1973, the scientific elite have been researching in this direction and many inventions have been made. But none has reached the level of industrial implementation. Currently, the use of bacteria-producing plastics is under investigation, and this offers a lot of new and better application ideas, especially in the medical field. This idea is not new, and work is under way in Asia to host an insect that produces natural resin, out of which one can manufacture synthetic plastics. At this moment unfortunately, it is quite expensive — to get 1 kilo of the basis for the natural resign, 300,000 of the insects have to work for six months.

Besides more new applications in the various fields of all industries and the development of more sophisticated and energy-efficient machinery, we face the challenge of getting away from oil as the only resource considered to produce plastics.

Franz is international executive director of Ningbo, China-based Haitian Plastics Machinery Group Ltd.

[ Opinion ]