Carbon-chain polymer | chemistry | Britannica (original) (raw)

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plastics

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  In plastic: The composition, structure, and properties of plastics
  …polymers having only aliphatic (linear) carbon atoms in their backbone chains. All the commodity plastics listed above fall into this category. The structure of polypropylene can serve as an example; here attached to every other carbon atom is a pendant methyl group (CH3):
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structure

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  In major industrial polymers
  …composition, industrial polymers are either carbon-chain polymers (also called vinyls) or heterochain polymers (also called noncarbon-chain, or nonvinyls). In carbon-chain polymers, as the name implies, the backbones are composed of linkages between carbon atoms; in heterochain polymers a number of other elements are linked together in the backbones, including oxygen,…
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