PLASTIC INDUSTRY

Wairarapa Times-Age, 30 December 1939, Page 7

PLASTIC INDUSTRY

DEVELOPMENT FOR WAR PURPOSES. CONSIDERABLE EXPANSION MADE. A London report has said that more than 120 different articles are now being made for war use by the British plastic industry. They include bomb-release equipment, cartridge cases, certain types of bomb cases, rifle butts, mine-finding equipment, badges, searchlight control insulation, stocks for guns, aircraft propeller blades and transparent hooding for gun turrets in aeroplanes. . . Plastics are the result of a decision made by chemists after the Great War that wood, metal, fibre, rubber and all other natural products were not raw materials in themselves, but compounds of raw materials that are always present in superabundance in the air, water and soil. In coal chemists found an almost limitless supply of carbon, while air and water became inexhaustible reservoirs of oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen. As a result, the chemists decided that in the three sources of coal, water and air were the primary materials employed in the natural creation of most organic things and their by-products. Most plastics are resinous compounds made ,in the laboratory. Laminated plastics, made by many sheets of plastic-impregnated cloth, paper or plywood pressed together hot, possess amazing strength and are already used for such purposes as the construction of aircraft fuselages, it being suggested that the time is not distant when this use of plastics will so reduce production times and costs that huge fleets of aeroplanes will be within the means of all nations, however small. Such plastics, in addition to being used for insulating parts, go- into gear wheels, wallboard, instrument panels and other things. They supplement and often wholly replace wood, steel and slate. On the Queen Mary fireproof plastic wallboard lines staterooms. Other plastics replace glass and on the Great South Road, near Drury, there is now a series of roadmarkers whose reflectors are made from plastic prisms. Natural resins are being used for making door knobs, telephone parts and talking-machine records. Cellulose derivatives go into safety glass, photographic film, artificial leather, lacquers, toys, hairbrushes, pens; statues are being made of plastic materials, women’s clothes can be made from synthetic materials, and patent leather shoes can be made from cellulose.