Plastics are generally perceived as cheap materials only used for mass production of low quality articles. However, people tend to forget that this material can make high-technology applications of quality accessible to the public. This is how, thanks to plastics, technologies that were originally used and developed by the army in telecommunications, for instance, have been put on the market. Nowadays cell phones would not be that widely spread if they were not made of plastics.
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Another sector where a lot of technology is put into the products is the automotive industry. Many cars now include navigation systems, screens and DVD players, all made of plastics. But if we look under the bonnet, we can also find an element without which the car would actually not be running: the fuel tank.
Using plastics to produce this particular part of a car can be extremely cost-effective if we consider the complexity of its shape, its functional requirements (e.g. mechanical and chemical resistance) and the quantity of material to be used. Plastics offer in one single material a combination of great design flexibility, impact and corrosion resistance and low production costs (plastics can be processed at temperatures lower than steel or glass).
In conclusion, thinking that fuel tanks made of plastics are low-quality products is a big mistake. Plastics actually make it possible to produce high-technology products at a large scale and at affordable cost. Using price as a measure of the product’s quality in this case would not be appropriate: plastics offer so much to fuel tanks that it would be more relevant to think in terms of cost efficiency than in terms of price-quality relationship. |
summary:
Plastics are generally perceived as cheap materials only used for mass production of low quality articles. However, people tend to forget that this material can make high-technology applications of quality accessible to the public.
