Recovered plastics and premium recycled plastic pellets.
A Guide to Graded Plastics
The Discovery of Nylon
The 1920s witnessed a "plastics craze", as the use of cellophane spread throughout the world. One of the industry leaders -- DuPont -- became a hotbed for innovation concerning plastics.
Wallace Hume Carothers, a young Harvard chemist, became the head of the DuPont lab. The company was responsible for the moisture proofing of Cellophane and was well on its way to developing Nylon, which at the time they named Fibre 66. Carothers saw the possible value that a new tough plastic, such as Fibre 66 could possess.
The fibre replaced animal hair in toothbrushes and silk stockings. The stockings were unveiled in 1939, to great public acceptance. H. Staudinger in Germany was the first to recognise the structural nature of plastics, but Carothers built upon this theory. As demonstrated by Carothers, by substituting and inserting elements into the chemical chain, new materials and uses could be developed.
During the 1940s, the world saw the use of such materials as nylon; acrylic, neoprene, SBR, polyethylene, and many more polymers take the place of natural material supplies that were becoming exhausted.
