Plastic Production Essay -- Environment, Fossil Fuels

1.0 Research Background The term of plastic has attracted more attention in the literature for the past 100 years since the introduction of the first industrial plastic at the latter part of the 19th century. John Wesley Hyatt, an American, finally came upon the solution in year 1869 with celluloid which makes its debut in plastic industry (McCord, 1964). Ever since after, there have been several milestones in the history of material science as the invention of plastic has, arguably, touched more lives than any other technological breakthrough. Plastics play a significant role across the environmental, societal and economic dimensions of sustainable development. Our modern lifestyle would not be possible without plastics. Plastics have proliferated so readily throughout the modern world because of their inherent properties such as lightweight, versatility and durability (Fortelnà ½ et. al., 2004). By possessing these advantageous characteristics, plastics has become a good candidate for replacement of other materials that range from simple plastic parts such as household storage containers, to sophisticated devices such as heart replacement valves. It is this range of properties together with their low cost that has driven the annual worldwide demand for plastics to reach at least 308 million tonnes by 2010 (Andrady and Neal, 2009). 1.1 Impacts of Plastic Production Although plastics have had a remarkable impact on our culture and lifestyle, the production and use of plastics pose increasing threat to environment. Most plastics are made from fossil fuels and thus plastics production has an impact on oil consumption, both as a raw material and to deliver energy for the manufacturing process (van der Voet et al, 2003). The proce... ...is chapter. The literature review of the related subjects has been outlined in Chapter 2. The main objectives of this chapter are to present the latest knowledge and studies from other researchers relating to the feasibility of performing reprocessing operations in the plastic industry particularly in recycling of plastic and the implementation of Taguchi method in optimizing the injection moulding processing parameters to enhance the mechanical properties of the recycled plastic products. The following Chapter 3 delineates the methodology used in this research wherein every procedure of the experiments is explained in details. Chapter 4 analyzes and discusses the results obtained from the experiments based on the Taguchi method and analysis of variance (ANOVA). Chapter 5 highlights the conclusion on this research work and ends with the future work continuation.