Hi, that’s a lot of question marks. :S Polystyrene is a type of plastic and like most plastics we make it from oil by performing a bunch of different processes and chemical reactions in factories and oil refineries. Unfortunately this process isn’t very sustainable. Oil is ‘non-renewable’ meaning we will eventually run out of it and polystyrene does not biodegrade very quickly, meaning it doesn’t rot away when you throw it away – it just stays as rubbish for ages. 🙁
James is right, polystyrene is a type of plastic that is made from oil (not all plastics come from oil – i’ll tell you more further down)…I’ll explain a wee bit more though. polystyrene is a long string of styrene molecules all bonded together (poly means “many”)
Plastics are made from organic molecules from cellulose, coal, natural gas, salt and crude oil. I’ll tell you how we get them from crude oil; crude oil is a big soup of carbon and hydrogen that needs to be “distilled” in to different sized hydrocarbons that are used for different things. One of the things distilled from oil is a hydrocarbon called Naptha and this is what is used to make most plastics. There are 2 ways to make plastics one is polymerisation which (as you might have guessed from the name and what I told you earlier) which is the process of joining hydrocarbon molecules together in a chain, the length and shape of the chain is what makes plastics different to each other but there are 2 main types Thermoplastics (which soften on heating and then harden again on cooling) and Thermosets (which never soften when they have been moulded). Polystyrene is a thermoplastic.
gosh, I gave a long answer, I think I must find plastics really interesting ha ha
so long story short, polystyrene is made out of Hydrogen and Carbon
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