Elemental Business: Carbon Plastic
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 25 July 2014
⏱️ 35 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Plastics are one of the most useful substances known to man, strong, durable and abundant, but once in the environment, they are here to stay. Professor Andrea Sella tells us about the unique properties of carbon-based plastics - why they are so useful and why they are so hard to get rid of. And, Dr Susan Mossman, a materials science specialist at the Science Museum, gives us a plastics history lesson which has a few surprises along the way. But what happens when the high cost of hydro-carbons make plastics too expensive? Head of the National Non-Food Crops Centre in York, Dr Jeremy Tomkinson, is amongst those out there looking for alternatives. He tells us what a new generation of plastics might have to offer.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is a BBC podcast. You can get all our podcasts and our terms of use at BBCworldservis.com slash podcasts. |
| 0:12.7 | Hello and welcome to the latest in Business Daily's Elemental Economics series. |
| 0:20.4 | And today we're back with the most |
| 0:22.3 | important element of them all, with carbon. We'll be looking at its role in some of the most |
| 0:29.2 | useful and underrated materials of them all. By the 1930s, you've got synthetic plastics that |
| 0:36.1 | can be produced in whites and pale luminescent colours |
| 0:39.9 | and you get Ginger Rogers dancing in a beautiful white laminated interior. Yes, enter the glamorous |
| 0:46.9 | world of plastic with Business Daily from the BBC. This is our fourth programme trying to do justice to the incredible properties of a single element of carbon. |
| 1:04.6 | Meanwhile, there is breaking news in the world of elemental chemistry. Get out your copies of the periodic table because you can fill in |
| 1:11.4 | one of the empty spaces. It has been confirmed that element 117 does exist. Don't expect it to be |
| 1:19.1 | anywhere near as useful as carbon, however. The element, which is currently known by the temporary |
| 1:24.2 | name Unun Septium, is only around for a fraction of a second. It is the heaviest |
| 1:29.3 | element yet discovered, or more accurately, to be synthesized in a nuclear reactor. But the |
| 1:35.0 | scientists who confirmed its existence estimated it had a half-life of just 80 milliseconds. By contrast, |
| 1:42.2 | the element we're interested in today is much more enduring. We've already |
| 1:46.5 | looked at carbon's role in energy, in advanced materials, and even done a special program on |
| 1:51.6 | diamonds. What we haven't looked at yet are some of the most useful materials carbon molecules |
| 1:57.0 | are fashioned into. Plastics. They're useful because they're so, well, plastic. They can be |
| 2:02.5 | moulded into almost anything. So what makes them so malleable? Here, as always, is our mentor |
| 2:08.2 | of all things Mendelevian, Professor Andrea Seller of University College London. |
| 2:14.1 | One of the real triumphs of the second half of the 20th century was really the huge expansion |
| 2:20.3 | of plastics or to give them their more chemical term, polymers. And polymers are materials in which |
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