How much oil is used to make plastic?

Forty years ago, anything made of plastic was considered "cheap." That’s certainly not true today when plastics are used in thousands of products ranging from computers, automobile parts and important medical equipment to toys, cookware, sports equipment, and even clothes. And the plastics industry continues to grow rapidly. Just where do plastics come from?
What are plastics?
It may surprise students to learn that gutta-percha, shellac, and the horns of animals—all naturally occurring substances—were used as plastic material before the first synthetic plastics were produced. Gutta-percha is derived from the sap of certain trees, and shellac is made from the secretions of a tiny scale insect. Before horn can be used, however, it must be "plasticized," or softened, by being boiled in water or soaked in an alkaline solution.
The first synthetic plastic was made from the plant material cellulose. In 1869, John Wesley Hyatt, an American printer and inventor, found that cellulose nitrate could be used as an inexpensive substitute for ivory. The mixture could be plasticized with the addition of camphor. Celluloid, as this new material was called, became the only plastic of commercial importance for 30 years. It was used for eyeglass frames, combs, billiard balls, shirt collars, buttons, dentures, and photographic film.
In 1951, two young research chemists for Phillips Petroleum Company in Bartlesville, Okla., made discoveries that revolutionized the plastics world. Today, the plastics they discovered—polypropylene and polyethylene—are used to produce the vast majority of the thousands of plastics products all over the world. (Read more about their discoveries in "Serendipity, Science & Discoveries" in this publication.)

The source for today’s wide variety of plastics? Petroleum.

Petroleum to Plastics

The technological road from oil field to finished plastic product has numerous fascinating side trips. Here’s the route taken in the petroleum-to-plastics process:
1. Petroleum is drilled and transported to a refinery.
2. Crude oil and natural gas are refined into ethane, propane, hundreds of other petrochemical products and, of course, fuel for your car.
3. Ethane and propane are "cracked" into ethylene and propylene, using high-temperature furnaces.
4. Catalyst is combined with ethylene or propylene in a reactor, resulting in "fluff," a powdered material (polymer) resembling laundry detergent.
5. Fluff is combined with additives in a continuous blender.
6. Polymer is fed to an extruder where it is melted.
7. Melted plastic is cooled then fed to a pelletizer that cuts the product into small pellets.
8. Pellets are shipped to customers.

9. Customers manufacture plastic products by using processes such as extrusion, injection molding, blow molding, etc.

Plastics Processing Methods

Extrusion Molding -- the main process used to form plastics. A heated plastic compound is forced continuously through a forming die made in the desired shape (like squeezing toothpaste from a tube, it produces a long, usually narrow, continuous product). The formed plastic cools under blown air or in a water bath and hardens on a moving belt. Rods, tubes, pipes, Slinkys®, and sheet and thin film (such as food wraps) are extruded then coiled or cut to desired lengths.
Plastic fibers also are made by an extrusion process. Liquid resin is squeezed through thousands of tiny holes called spinnerets to produce the fine threads from which plastic fabrics are woven.
Injection Molding -- is the second most widely used process to form plastics. The plastic compound, heated to a semifluid state, is squirted into a mold under great pressure and hardens quickly. The mold then opens and the part is released. This process can be repeated as many times as necessary and is particularly suited to mass production methods. Injection molding is used for a wide variety of plastic products, from small cups and toys to large objects weighing 30 pounds or more.

Blow Molding -- pressure is used to form hollow objects, such as the soda pop bottle or two-gallon milk bottle, in a direct or indirect method. In the direct blow-molding method, a partially shaped, heated plastic form is inserted into a mold. Air is blown into the form, forcing it to expand to the shape of the mold. In the indirect method, a plastic sheet or special shape is heated then clamped between a die and a cover. Air is forced between the plastic and the cover and presses the material into the shape of the die.

Classroom Activity

Plastics:  Imagine Life Without Them
Suppose you could step inside a time machine and go back 60 or 100 years. You may easily convince yourself a day without cars, telephones, and television—maybe even computers—might be kind of fun. Have you thought about the little things, though? Little things are often what are missed the most.
Imagine a day without touching something made of plastic!
People were cleaning their teeth before there was a choice of red, blue or purple plastic toothbrushes, but would you really want one made from metal or wood? Milk and shampoo used to be sold in glass bottles, and that wasn’t a problem unless you dropped one and it broke. What a mess!
The word plastic comes from the Greek word plastikos, meaning "able to be molded." That characteristic, or what scientists call "property," makes plastic perfect for things like action figures and dolls. What other properties does plastic have that make it a good choice for particular products? Try these experiments, then use what you learn to list 10 or even 20 good candidates for plastic.
Materials

• pieces of aluminum, plastic, and wood about the same size (approximately 2’ long, 1" wide, and 1/8" thick (rulers or yardsticks might work)
• two 6" stacks of books
• a 2-pound canned good item
• a 4-foot length of string
• a tennis ball
• a plastic and a paper grocery sack.

Place the two stacks of books about 9" apart. Lay the aluminum strip across the books, making a level bridge. Lay the string parallel to the strip. Next place the canned good in the middle of the strip. Use the string to measure the deflection (bend) in the strip and write down your observation.
Repeat the process with the wood and plastic, then discuss what you have observed about the strength and stiffness of each material. (Which material would you choose for a toothbrush handle? How about the toothbrush bristles?)
Next, soak the tennis ball in water until it is thoroughly wet. Place it first in the plastic sack and then the paper one, letting it sit in each for 5 minutes before shaking each bag vigorously. Which bag stays dry? Does the water cause the paper bag to sag and even break? What can you conclude about how each material repels or absorbs water? Which bag would you choose to carry your carton of ice cream?
The information, or data, you’ve gathered from your experiments is just what a scientist uses to decide what material to use in an engineering design!
(Activity provided by the engineers of Phillips Petroleum Company.)
Sources Gideon, Joyce Kirkpatrick. The Plastics Pioneers:Phillips 66 Company. Phillips Petroleum Company. 28 December 1990.
"Life of the Past." Investigating the Earth. Houghton Mifflin Company. Boston, Massachusetts. 1993.
"Plastics: Manufacture." Compton’s Living Encyclopedia. Online. America Online. 22 April 1997.

Webster’s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary. New World Dictionaries/Simon & Schuster. New York, New York. 1993.

PLASTICS, FUELS AND CHEMICALS FROM CRUDE OIL

 

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PLASTICS, FUELS AND CHEMICALS FROM CRUDE OIL

V. Ryan © 2011

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Oil refineries ‘refine’ oil in massive quantities, to produce the fuels we need. These include diesel, petrol and heating oil. However, some of the raw materials we need to manufacture plastics, are also extracted from oil at the refinery. When crude oil is refined, four percent ends up as raw materials for the production of plastics.
Oil is used widely for the production of plastics as it is composed of carbon and hydrogen. This is why oil is called a hydrocarbon. Oil and natural gas are the most important raw materials for plastics manufacture. To the plastics industry, Naphtha is the most important fraction distilled from crude oil. It is used in the production of a range of plastics.
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The History of How the Pharmaceutical Industry Intentionally Created Drug Addictions

The History of Opium and The History of How the Pharmaceutical Industry Intentionally Created Drug Addictions
    

    Written by Sarah C. Corriher  
 

Opium has been used medicinally and recreationally for centuries.  Fifteenth century China doctors used opium for medicine, with some using it recreationally.  It was the first effective antidepressant, sedative, and pain reliever.  However, opium addictions only began in the eighteenth century, when the British began to monopolize the sale of opium.  It is no coincidence that when the British, with their chemical industry, began selling opium that these chemically altered opiums began creating addictions.  Completely natural, unadulterated plants are not addictive until they have been "refined" and concentrated.  As a result of what the British did, opium eventually became illegal under Chinese law, but the sale from the British continued.

In 1839, the Emperor, Tao Kwang, ordered his minister Lin Tse-hsu to deal with the opium problem.  Lin requested help from Queen Victoria, but was ignored.  As a result, the Emperor confiscated 20,000 barrels of opium and detained some foreign traders, many of whom were British.  The Chinese believed that because their ceramics and silk technologies were superior to their British counterparts that their naval ships would also be.  They were wrong.  The British retaliated to this interference with their drug ("medical") trade by attacking the port-city of Canton.

This was the beginning of what would become known as the 'First Opium War'.  It was launched by the biggest, richest drug cartel that the world has ever known; the British Empire.  When the Chinese were defeated, they had no choice but to sign the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842.  They were required to allow the trade of opium, to make large payments to the British, and even to open five new ports to the foreign drug ("medical") trade.  They were also forced to give Hong Kong to Britain.  Opium was, technically, still an illegal substance in China, but the Chinese were forced to accept British imports.

In 1856, the Second Opium War began and ended, with the Chinese being defeated once more.  As a result, they were forced to sign the Treaty of Tientsin, and the sale of opium was legalized.  The British claimed that the Chinese people had a "right" to this "harmless luxury", without regard to its own government.  Opium imports increased to unprecedented levels.  By the end of the nineteenth century, an estimated quarter of the male population of China was addicted to the enhanced opium.

In the United States, many of the early Americans cultivated their own opium.  Thomas Jefferson cultivated opium at his garden in Monticello.  This fact is generally covered-up by modern historians, who have the politically correct belief that all drugs are bad, even in their harmless natural state, and that prohibition is the only option of a healthy society.

Morphine was first isolated from opium in 1805 by German pharmacist, Wilhelm Sertürner.  It was named after Morpheus, the Greek god of dreams.  When opium products are taken orally, they are known to cause stomach and digestive disturbances, so the invention of the hypodermic needle in the mid-nineteenth century allowed direct injection of morphine.  The poor could not afford to inject drugs, so morphine was used daily by the elite classes, and the cost of opium fell.  It was also used extensively on wounded soldiers in the U.S. Civil War.  Incredibly, the pharmaceutical companies not only promoted morphine as being non-addictive, but to also cure opium addictions.  Missionaries in the early twentieth century handed out "Jesus Opium" pills in order to assist with addictions.  The active ingredient was morphine.  Of course, this only created greater addictions, which conveniently helped the chemical industry more.

In the mid-nineteenth Century, Chinese immigrants had appeared in the United States in large numbers to help build railways and work with California mines.  Opium use had become a part of their culture, and opium, along with the Chinese, were demonized as being destructive to the youth.  Dr. John Witherspoon, who would later become president of the American Medical Association (AMA), told allopaths to search for a cure for opium addictions, and a morphine alternative.  The alternative was to be non-addictive.

In 1874, an English pharmacist, C. R. Alder Wright had boiled morphine and acetic acid together, producing diacetylmorphine.  Diacetylmorphine was synthesized and marketed commercially by the German pharmaceutical giant, Bayer.  In 1898, Bayer launched the best-selling drug-brand of all time, Heroin.

Epilogue

When will we learn from history what to expect from these people and their "helpful" chemical "improvements" upon nature?  You will see this identical pattern for all other illegal narcotics, like for instance, cocaine.  They created all of the addictive drug monsters, and they got the results that they wanted.  In fact, you can technically still get a doctor's prescription for cocaine, and even get it filled at certain pharmacies.  Will the public ever see the pattern?

The reason why diseases are never cured with modern medicine is because curing is not as profitable as creating life-long drug addicts.  This is why all the diseases are "chronic" now, and why the "medicines" seem only to perpetuate the diseases that they are supposedly meant to "treat" (but never ever cure).  The system is broken by design to keep us dependent.  Why do you think they "treat" cancer with extreme carcinogens like radiation?  Radiation must be one of the most safe and effective health benefiting treatments, because they just cannot find that elusive cure, right?

The biggest difference between your doctor and the local drug dealer is that the drug dealer is considerably more honest about how he earns his money.

Western Medicine is Rockefeller Medicine – All The Way

Western medicine has some good points, for sure, and is great in an emergency, but it’s high time people realized that today’s mainstream medicine (western medicine or allopathy), with its focus on drugs, radiation and surgery, is at its foundation a Rockefeller creation. The Rockefellers, of course, are one of the most rich and powerful families of the elite black nobility. Behind their spurious facade of philanthropy, they are power-hungry tyrants intent on owning the entire world, and depopulating it through eugenics-based programs like forced sterilization, water fluoridation, abortions and vaccinations. They have either majorly or fully created (and still dominate) the United Nations, the World Health Organization, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, Planned Parenthood and many, many other organizations that either rule the world or influence culture to a large extent.
Despite the dominance of western medicine nowadays, even just 100 years ago the situation was very different, so it’s worthwhile casting our minds back to how the we got to this place. How did western medicine and the giant conglomerate of multinational pharmaceutical corporations (“Big Pharma”) become the mainstream medical system in the US and other first world nations? And what alternatives are there?

Petroleum Drugs

Let’s go back in time to the late 1800s. John D. Rockefeller, a man quoted to have said “competition is sin”, is the head of the Rockefeller family and has just become very rich through extracting oil from the ground. Now he is looking for ways to capitalize even further with his oil, and he comes across the idea of using coal tar – a petroleum derivative – to make substances that affect the human mind, body and nervous system. These are called drugs, and they are excellent at masking or stopping symptoms, but overall do not cure the underlying cause of a disease.
Like other elite leaders of the New World Order who fit the description of an “evil genius” – those high on intellect and low on compassion – Rockefeller used his oil money to buy out part of the massive German pharmaceutical cartel, I.G. Farben. This was the very same cartel that would later assist Hitler to implement his eugenics-based vision of a New World Order founded on racial supremacy, by manufacturing chemicals and poisons for war. With the control of drug manufacturing under his wings, Rockefeller then embarked on a decidedly wicked plan – wicked from the point of view of a free and healthy humanity, but brilliant from a business perspective.

Western medicine relies on Big Pharma’s petroleum drugs, which the body can never ultimately assimilate. Meanwhile, it engages in biopiracy to steal Nature’s best compounds and patent them.

Destroying any Competition to Western Medicine

Rockefeller saw that there were many types of doctors and healing modalities in existence at that time, from chiropractic to naturopathy to homeopathy to holistic medicine to herbal medicine and more. He wanted to eliminate the competitors of western medicine (the only modality which would propose drugs and radiation as treatment, thus enriching Rockefeller who owned the means to produce these treatments), so he hired a man called Abraham Flexner to submit a report to Congress in 1910. This report “concluded” that there were too many doctors and medical schools in America, and that all the natural healing modalities which had existed for hundreds or thousands of years were unscientific quackery. It called for the standardization of medical education, whereby only the allopathic-based AMA be allowed to grant medical school licenses in the US.
Sadly, Congress acted upon the conclusions and made them law. Incredibly, allopathy became the standard mainstream modality, even though its 3 main methods of treatment in the 1800s had been blood-letting, surgery and the injection of toxic heavy metals like lead and mercury to supposedly displace disease! It should be noted that hemp was also demonized and criminalized not long after this, not because there is anything dangerous about it, but because it was a huge threat (as both medicine and fuel) to the Rockefeller drug and oil industries, respectively.

The Rockefeller and Carnegie Tax-Exempt Foundations for “Efficient” Philanthropy

The story doesn’t stop there. Rockefeller and another elite leader Carnegie used their tax-exempt Foundations, from 1913 on, to offer huge grants to the best medical schools all over America – on the proviso that only an allopathic-based curriculum be taught, and that some of their agents be allowed to sit on the Board of Directors. They called this “efficient” philanthropy, which, when through the Orwellian translation unit, means they wanted a return on their investment. They systematically dismantled the curricula of these schools by removing any mention of the natural healing power of herbs and plants, or of the importance of diet to health. The result is a system which to this day churns out doctors who are, almost always, utterly clueless about nutrition and disregard the idea that what you eat can actually heal or hurt you.
A couple of decades after this, another law was passed that further entrenched western medicine in America. The Hill-Burton Act of 1946 gave hospitals grants for construction and modernization, on the condition they provide free healthcare to anyone in need, without discrimination of any kind. Although there were good sides to this, the downside was that once people had become dependent on this system for their healthcare needs – especially those on pharmaceutical pills which need to be taken day after day without end – the system switched into a paid system, and the Rockefellers found themselves with new lifelong customers.
The bitter truth is that, in general, when you go to your Western doctor, you are seen as a potential market for the medical factory’s products. For Big Pharma, there is no financial incentive to heal you, because a patient cured is a customer lost. Even if you are not sick, Big Pharma is still targeting you, trying to convince you that you are ill (e.g. with psychiatry’s ridiculous list of fictitious diseases, many of them fake) so that you will try its latest pill. Pregnant women who go to the doctor are treated like this, and peddled intravenous fluid bags, fetal monitors, ultrasound (radiation for a vulnerable baby), a host of drugs, the totally unnecessary episiotomy, and – to top it all off – the Caesarean delivery!

Bio-Piracy: The Business Model of Western Medicine’s Big Pharma Cartel

Remember, all these synthetic drugs are isolates. Many are derived from plant compounds, but because Nature cannot be patented and sold, Big Pharma has no interest in natural cures. What they do instead is engage in bio-piracy – research natural compounds, copy them (or modify them slightly) in a lab, then try to steal and patent them. If they get a patent, they then market their pill as a wonder drug while simultaneously (through fake scientific research) suppress and criticize the original plant as being worthless, so you won’t go to the source of the cure. Ironically, guess what type of medicine John D. Rockefeller used and the British Royal Family still uses? Homeopathy!
Modern western medicine seems to have lost the supposed point of its existence: healing people. In his revealing book “Confessions of a Medical Heretic“, Dr. Robert Mendolsohn quotes an article entitled “Cleveland’s Marvelous Medical Factory” which boasted of the Cleveland Clinic’s “accomplishments last year: 2,980 open-heart operations, 1.3 million laboratory tests, 73,320 electrocardiograms, 7,770 full-body x-ray scans, 24,368 surgical procedures.” Seems fancy, yet none of these procedures has been proven to have anything to do with maintaining or restoring health. When people get screened for a disease, they are being subjected to dangerous radiation (more money for the Rockefellers) which harms tissue and can end up causing the exact disease it is supposed to be protecting against – as happens daily with the mammogram scam, designed to drum up new breast cancer clients.

John D. Rockefeller, the oil tycoon who helped create Big Pharma and Western Medicine.

Rockefeller Philanthropy is Social Control

The Rockefellers and other elites use philanthropy as a tool for control. It’s social engineering with a nice PR sheen. A free lunch is not really free, whether private (Rockefeller-style western medicine) or public/governmental (Obama-style socialized medicine), because even if you get something at no cost, you are required to give up your data and your privacy. They want you dependent on their system – then they’ll raise the rates once you’re trapped.
This is big business – and it’s also a big killer. Dr. Barbara Starfield published a study in the year 2000 that found that there were 225,000 iatrogenic (allopathic doctor caused) deaths in the US every year. However, this was only counting direct deaths; when you factor in all indirect deaths, as Dr. Gary Null did in 2011 in his report Death by Medicine, the figure is closer to 784,000 per year! That’s 7.8 million people dead from western medicine every 10 years!
Null concluded: “It is evident that the American medical system is the leading cause of death and injury in the United States …”
Whenever a lot of people die in a staged false flag attack (like 3000 people on 9/11) or in a staged mind control shooting (like 50 or so people) we hear all about it on the media. Yet between 616 and 2147 Americans are dying every day from Rockefeller Western medicine, and we don’t hear a thing!

Natural Solutions that Surpass Rockefeller-Created Western Medicine

At this point let us turn from the problem to the solutions – and fortunately there are many. The famous ancient Greek physician Hippocrates wrote:

“Nature heals. The doctor’s task consists in strengthening the natural healing powers, to direct them, and especially not to interfere with them.”

The immune system is your number one defense against any disease – not a vaccine. Most natural medicine is designed to treat the body holistically, not to “cure” one disease only to have it transform and mutate into another ailment. When you takes plants and herbs as medicine, you normally take the whole food, not an isolate, because it is based on a holistic understanding. Likewise, Traditional Chinese Medicine defines all disease as stagnation and treats sickness as an imbalance to be brought back into balance. What is the point of transferring an imbalance in one area into an imbalance in another area? None, unless you are trying to profit off disease like Big Pharma. It is not real healing.
There are so many natural cures and remedies out there, if you take the time to look. Two examples among thousands are turmeric which will do more for your blood pressure and diabetes than any drug can, and apricot kernels (rich in laetrile which selectively kills cancer cells and leaves healthy ones intact) which will handle cancer better than chemotherapy. The Gerson Therapy has also healed thousands of “terminal” cancer patients who were told by doctors of western medicine, “there’s nothing more we can do for you.”
Western medicine has its time and place, and its strengths and weaknesses. Western medicine may be a good system in a critical emergency and for complicated surgical procedures, but for general conditions, there are so many better alternatives. Time to start exploring them!

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