Beech Tree News Network

I’ve always been a big fan of organization—don’t look at my bedroom, though.  (I tripped over something in there last night, and I have a big bruise on my knee, and a small knot on the back of my head.)  I like things boxed up or stored in plastic bins, and I’m always repositioning things for maximum use and aesthetics, so it would stand to reason that I would admire the inventors of cardboard and plastic.  

Cardboard is biodegradable, compostable and recyclable, but plastic has fallen out of favor with the green crowd, because it possesses none of those qualities.  I am still a fan of plastic, however, and it still has a place in my house, even as I’m hoping for the day when scientists will come up with a way to make synthetic plastic all of those things in my lifetime.

Cardboard is made of paper fibers from wood pulp—mostly from Loblolly Pine.  The fibers in that particular pine are long, so it lends itself well to paper products.  The fibers can come from recycled paper or fresh wood.  The process of converting wood into cardboard was invented by the German chemist Carl F. Dahl in 1884.  Today the process starts by pounding and squeezing the pulp wood—machines are involved.  Fillers like clay, chalk, gum or starch are added to the processed pulp wood.  A Fourdrinier Machine removes any excess water.  As a final step, the cardboard is pressed between wool felt rollers and passed between steam heated cylinders (norcalcompactors.net).

In 1907, Belgian chemist, Leo Baekeland, beat his Scottish rival, James Swinburne, to the patent office with his invention by just one day.  His invention was fully synthetic plastic.  He called his discovery Bakelite.  (Others before Baekeland had made a form of plastic using organic material derived from cellulose.)  Bakelite was a combination of two combined chemicals, formaldehyde and phenol, under heat and pressure.  Yes, that formaldehyde, the one used for embalming.  Phenol is a toxic white crystalline solid that comes from coal tar (sciencemuseum.org).  Don’t think I would have wanted to store my left-over lasagna in that, so luckily, I don’t have to.  Today’s plastics are mostly polyethylene and polypropylene that are made from ethylene (a natural gas hydrocarbon) and propylene (an organic compound). (plasticeurope.org)

We come now to what hasn’t been invented but should have been. I bemoan the lack of a small object that can lift heavy things in my ongoing need to move things around in my living area.  (There are all kinds of big things to lift heavy things.  Consider the forklift, the backhoe, the frontend loader.)  Engineers are studying the ant, the small insect that can lift up to 50 times its own weight and can stand up to 2,000 pounds of pressure on its neck before its body comes apart—I know, I know, I wouldn’t want to be part of that experiment either.  Entomology.org explains that ants are uncannily strong on a small scale because their bodies are light.  They have hard exoskeletons, and their muscles really don’t have to provide support.  “On a human-sized scale, though ants are overcome by basic physics.  Their weight increases with their overall volume, while the strength of their muscles only increases with surface areas.”  What this means is that a human-sized ant couldn’t carry huge loads on the human scale.  The ant-studying engineers are hoping to invent micro-sized robots that will combine soft and hard parts in the same way that the ant’s body does.  I say, bring it on!  My back is killing me.