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Mystery #1Tier 2plastic oil chemistry

How does thick black oil from underground become a clear plastic bottle?

Oil that comes up from deep underground is thick, black and gloopy, nothing like the clear, light bottle in your lunchbox. Yet that bottle really was made from oil. Somehow the gloopy black stuff was turned into something hard and see-through. How does thick black oil from underground become a clear plastic bottle?

Open sacks of small pale blue plastic pellets, the raw beads that factories melt to make plastic objects.
Photo: SuSanA Secretariat · CC BY 2.0 · via Wikimedia Commons

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