Polyvinyl Chloride

Polyvinyl chloride, or PVC, is the world's third most widely produced synthetic plastic after polyethylene and polypropylene, made in two broad forms: a rigid version used in construction products such as pipes and window frames, and a flexible version, created by adding plasticizers, used in cable insulation, flooring and clothing. The German chemist Eugen Baumann first synthesized the material by accident in 1872, when vinyl chloride left in a flask on a shelf polymerized into a white solid, but early attempts at commercial production failed because the resulting plastic proved too difficult to process. The American chemist Waldo Semon and the B.F. Goodrich Company solved that problem in 1926 by developing plasticizing methods that made PVC workable for industrial use, and the material is manufactured today chiefly through the suspension polymerization of vinyl chloride monomer, which accounts for roughly eighty percent of production.