What is the process of oil being turned into plastic?
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Petroleum (“oil”) is made up of lots of different kinds of molecules, all of which are hydrocarbons: made of hydrogen and carbon atoms. The thing about carbon is that there are *lots* of ways carbon atoms can connect together and with other elements (other kinds of atoms). To make “plastic” out of “oil”, we chemically break up the petroleum hydrocarbon molecules, sort out the resulting molecules (when you break a molecule into two or more parts, all the parts are still molecules if they have more than one atom) using some real “gee wizz” industrial chemistry, and if you do it right they reassemble themselves into very very long repeating chains of the sorted parts all by themselves. The original oil was a chaotic mess of all different parts, but by sorting those parts, some of them have this cool ability to form plastic polymers when it’s just those parts without anything else to make things messy.
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