Polymers Used in Everyday Life

From the stone age to the age of computers, a significant development is self evident in the materials that make our daily life comfortable. One of these revolutionary materials in the modern world is polymers. Polymers are natural or synthetic substances composed of very large molecules, called macromolecules, which are multiples of simpler chemical units called monomers. These are present in almost every aspect of modern day lives because of their vast spectrum of properties. Natural polymers like wool, cotton, and silk are present in our society long before the notion itself. In 1869 John Wesley Hyatt invented celluloid, the first synthetic plastic, while searching for an artificial replacement for ivory. It was not until 1907 when polymers entered the industrial sector with the invention of Bakelite, the first fully synthetic plastic, containing zero naturally occurring molecules. These inventions later emerged as a field of macromolecular chemistry, a field closely associated with the name of Herman Staudinger, who received the Nobel Prize in 1953 for first proposing the idea of polymerization a process of reacting monomer molecules together in a chemical reaction to form polymer chains . Since then, there have been several developments in the synthesis of various polymers, contributing to six more Nobel prizes associated with the field of polymeric sciences. In this review we will discuss some of the most commonly used polymers in everyday life. Dr. Pushpraj Singh "Polymers Used in Everyday Life" Published in International Journal of Trend in Scientific Research and Development (ijtsrd), ISSN: 2456-6470, Volume-6 | Issue-1 , December 2021, URL: https://www.ijtsrd.com/papers/ijtsrd48033.pdf Paper URL: https://www.ijtsrd.com/chemistry/polymer-chemistry/48033/polymers-used-in-everyday-life/dr-pushpraj-singh