The term plastics includes materials composed of various elements such as carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, chlorine, and sulfur. Plastics typically have high molecular weight, meaning that each molecule can have thousands of atoms bound together. Naturally occurring materials, such as wood, horn, and rosin, are also composed of molecules of high molecular weight. Manufactured or synthetic plastics are often designed to mimic the properties of natural materials. In fact, some of the earliest plastics were developed to replace scarce natural…