AGE OF PLASTICS

Auckland Star, Volume LXXIV, Issue 80, 5 April 1943, Page 5

AGE OF PLASTICS

U.S. EXPERT'S FORECAST

WAR FORCES DEVELOPMENT

(0.C.) SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 28. in the post-war expansion period of the plastics industry Americans can expect just about everything but a synthetic T-bone steak. "The sky is the limit; the organic chemist can draw his raw materials from the earth, the air and the sea," declared Dr. Gordon M. Kline, chief of the plastics section of the United States Bureau of Standards, on his arrival in Los Angeles. Tracing the tremendous growth of plastics, Dr. Kline estimated that the industry's output has increased by more than 400 per cent since 1939. '/We are concentrating on the synthetics we already know about, of necessity, but at the end of the war you can expect a flood of new materials and new applications," he said. Dr. Kline, who recently visited England at the invitation of the British Ministry of Supply, was in California to address the Society of the Plastics Industry. England, he said, is more advanced than the United States in the use of plastics in the aeroplane industry. The devastating new Mosquito light bomber of the resin-bonded plywood is Britain's prize example of the use of synthetics in war. "But I am convinced," he added, "that our country is using plastics to much greater advantage in ordnance and transport than any other country in the war. They could all learn a great deal from us. In the volume and variety of plastics produced the United States is far in front." The housewife, Dr. Kline said, is > indirectly aiding the war effort by doing without new plastic utensils. The salt cellar . she might have bought is now a piece of electrical equipment, perhaps, or the lining of a soldier's helmet. That pair of nylon hose she did not buy was used in a parachute.