A community to post scientific articles, news, and civil discussion.
dart board;; science bs
rule #1: be kind
Chitin is a real biopolymer that makes up shells.
There are some organisms that have been modified to produce polymers from varuous food sources, but those are more for biofermentation production processes than something the organisms would use as a shell
You’re really going to have to define “plastics” to get a good answer to that.
Plastic in the material science definition means any material that can be permanently deformed without breaking. So, lots of materials created by living things meet that definition.
If you mean thermoplastics, which is the more common colloquial definition, well, several things meet that definition as well, including horn and many other types of keratin.
If you mean polymerized hydrocarbon based thermoplastics, which is what you probably are thinking of, chitin is the most common answer.
Now that I think about it I think I just threw the term “plastic” in because I thought it would give a rough area of inquiry because I read that “plastics” were base resistant.
Actually scratch that; what I was ultimately trying to find out was some examples of base resistant biological building materials, not necessarily plastics.
Apologies for being confused about terminology; I just finished my first year of chemistry