If plastic was made in 1907 how do they know it may take up to 1000 years to decompose?
In: Chemistry
The conceptual study design to determine something like this is modified and used in many other endeavors on weathering predictions. Engineers want to know how long steel might take to corrode in different environments, so they might design purposefully stressful conditions and add a piece of steel to it. The conditions might not reflect actual ambient conditions but by doing this they make room for a margin of safety in their predictions (i.e., if high humidity, salty air, and high temperatures corrode steel X fast, it’s safe to set a floor on how soon we ought to expect corrosion in less harsh conditions). This is also a common practice in running stability test son pharmaceutical or food products – accelerating degrading conditions to estimate the expected shelf life of consumer-goods. In the case of plastic, it’s possible to design chambers or experiments where a piece of plastic decomposes in only, say, 2 years and design a model which might predict how that plastic would decomopose under less harsh (“ambient”) conditions.
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