What are plastics and polymers made of?
Chain Gang Magic
What are plastics and polymers made of?
Pick up almost anything around you — a water bottle, a toothbrush, a phone case — and you're holding plastic. It feels solid and simple, like it just appeared that way. But every bit of plastic is secretly built from millions of tiny invisible building blocks, snapped together into long, long chains. Let's go find out what those chains are made of.
Start with the word "polymer," because it does all the heavy lifting. It just means "many parts." A polymer is a long chain made by linking up one small unit over and over and over again. Think of a paper-clip chain: one clip is boring, but link a few million of them and you get something long and bendy and surprisingly strong.
