How Do They Make Plastic?

Plastics are made from oil and natural gas.  Both oil and natural gas have carbon-containing molecules which are the building blocks of plastic.  These small carbon molecules are called monomers.  Mono-means one.  To make plastics many monomers are linked together to form very large molecules called polymers.  POLY means many.  Chemists link together different types of monomers in many different arrangements to make different kinds of plastics.  One way to imagine how this works is to make a paper chain.  You can change how the chain looks by using different colored strips of paper--different sizes of paper -etc-- Chemists change the type of plastic formed by using different kinds of monomers.  They also add other stuff to change how the plastic looks, such as coloring.