NEW SPECIALITY PLASTICS.

Prophets, market researchers and pessimists have been predicting for more than ten years that development in the plastics sector would be concentrated on the modification, improvement and blending of known and established plastics, on account of the low olefin prices, the continuing oil crisis and/or the expected world-wide recession. Despite these pessimistic predictions, a surprisingly large number of new plastics have made their appearance during the last 4-5 years, some of them with new chemical structures. This report describes the latest developments in engineering plastics, thermosets, elastomers, thermoplastic elastomers, fibers and industrially used biopolymers. For figures and formulae rep. reaction equations, see German text.