Looking back to the year 1933, when polythene came into existence in the form we know it today, and changed our lives for good and bad. 27th March - The birth day of polythene!
Polythene's story: The accidental birth of plastic bags
It was at the end of the 19th century when a German scientist, Hans von Pechmann, discovered a waxy residue at the bottom of his test tube. He had little idea of the material's significance; he was not to know that the substance was an early form of what we now use to bottle our shampoo, cocoon our sandwiches and wrap our wires. He had, completely by accident, made polythene, one of the world's most widely used and controversial materials.
The product Von Pechmann made that day in 1899 was virtually identical to the modern chemical and a pair of his colleagues – Eugen Bamberger and Friedrich Tschirner – called it polymethylene. But unlike polythene, which is versatile enough to make hardy and filmic plastics, this waxy resin was not useful in practical terms; and so little was made of it.
Like future volumes of plastic, the Von Pechmann experiment was duly buried. It was not for another 34 years that the people who are officially credited with inventing polythene chanced upon it. But tomorrow, on the 75th anniversary of this discovery, there will be no ticker-tape parades for any inventor of the woebegone plastic. Due to the recent push to eradicate plastic bags, people are more likely to want to forget the occasion.
"Polythene seemed a great boon, not least to the food industry, when it was first invented. But it is now increasingly being seen as a mixed blessing. It has helped improve food hygiene at the cost of environmental degradation. It is a classic example of a short-term fix now unravelling," said Professor Tim Lang, a commissioner for natural resources and land use at the Sustainable Development Commission, of polythene's discovery.
Polythene's innovation – in the form that we now know it – in fact occurred in 1933. It was the work of ICI's Eric Fawcett and Reginald Gibson, who, after waking up one morning and deciding to experiment with gases under high pressure, spotted that part of their apparatus looked like it had been dipped in paraffin wax. Gibson's simple notes, made at the time at the company's base in Northwich, Cheshire, belied their importance: "Waxy solid found in reaction tube."
Two years later ICI developed the means for making polythene on an industrial scale, and shortly afterwards it was used for the first round-the-world telephone cable. During the Second World War, it won near-heroic-status as a vital radar component. It was not until the rise of the British supermarket in the 1950s that it really came into mass use. These stores' indulgences have since been freely criticised. The substance is made from crude oil through a process known as "cracking", and the resultant product essentially comes in two forms: "hard" and "soft", the former being used to bind our pipes and contain our fuel in tanks, the latter to shrink-wrap our sausages and insulate our television cables. In Britain we get through a combined 1.6 million tonnes of both types every year. The results create mountains of landfill.
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