Even my peers make fun of me for this - it continually blows my mind that carbon dioxide is a part of a plastic. Logically, I know that there’s nothing special about a gas becoming incorporated into a nonvolatile chemical (ethylene, for example, is a gas and is incorporated into polyethylene, another plastic!). I think the idea has always rocked my world because CO₂’s so ubiquitous and comes out of things like you, me, and fire. CO₂, you see, can actually combine with a molecule of water to form carbonic acid:

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Sorry to punt again but I’m just getting home. Today’s molecule is carboxymethylcellulose. It is made from cellulose by its reaction with chloroacetic acid.

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Here’s a quickie. One of the earliest totally synthetic plastics (I don’t count cellulose derivatives since the work of polymerizing the stuff was already done by the tree) was Bakelite, a resin of formaldehyde and phenol (I show only the monomers here, that Wikipedia link will give you an idea of the kind of complex mixtures you get).

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