If plastic was made in 1907 how do they know it may take up to 1000 years to decompose?

Question

If plastic was made in 1907 how do they know it may take up to 1000 years to decompose?

In: Chemistry

Answer 1

You don’t need to time me over the course of a 100 mile drive to tell if I’m going 100 miles an hour. You can simply measure how long it takes me to go one mile and multiply that by 100.

IRL the vehicle measures how fast the wheels are rotating. Knowing the circumpherence of the wheel allows the vehicle to compute how far you would go at a given speed in an hour. It doesn’t take an hour to calculate that.

Same thing with plastic. You can measure how much it decomposes in one year, and determine how many more years (approximately) it would take to break down all the way.