Recovered plastics and premium recycled plastic pellets.
Rayon and Cellophane
Rayon -- another modified cellulose -- was first developed in 1891 in Paris by Louis Marie Hilaire Bernigaut, the Count of Chardonnet. He was searching for a way to produce man-made silk. After studying silkworms, Bernigaut noticed that the worm would secrete a liquid from a narrow orifice that would harden upon exposure to air and turn into silk. He deduced that if he could find a liquid that would have similar characteristics to silk before being secreted, he could then pass it through a man-made apparatus to form fibres that could be spun and feel like silk. The only problem with his new invention was that it was highly flammable. Charles Topham later solved this problem.
Dr. Jacques Edwin Brandenberger, a Swiss textile engineer, who came upon the idea for a clear, protective, packaging layer in 1900, discovered cellophane. Brandenberger was seated at a restaurant when he noticed a customer spill a bottle of wine onto the tablecloth. The waiter removed the cloth replacing it with another and disposed of the soiled one.
Brandenberger swore that he would discover someway to apply a clear flexible film to cloth, which would keep it safe from such accidents and allow it to be easily cleaned with the swipe of a clean towel. He worked on resolving this problem by utilising different materials until he hit pay dirt in 1913 by adding Viscose (now known as Rayon).
Brandenberger added viscose to cloth but the end result was a brittle material that was too stiff to be of any use. Yet Brandenberger saw another potential for the viscose material. He developed a new machine that could produce viscose sheets, which he marketed as Cellophane.
With a few more improvements, Cellophane allowed for a clear layer of packaging for any product -- the first fully flexible, waterproof wrap.
The versatility of plastic in a basic form is immense, it offers such a wide range of structures both organic and bizzarre in their composition.
