WHY YOU CAN’T COUNT ON POLAR FLEECE SHEEP
TO GET SLEEPY

Have you ever heard about the old trick of counting sheep to get to sleep? The great poet John Lennon was out of luck when he wrote about being so tired that his mind was on the blink. Polar fleece sheep do not exist so there’s no such thing as counting them to become drowsy.

Real sheep can be identified by their woolly covering called fleece and their tendency to bleat “bah-bah” while being sheared which roughly translates into “Suddenly, I feel very cold!”

But "Polar Fleece" is a synthetic fabric made from petrochemicals that are derived from crude oil after many, many processing steps. That's right! Crude oil can be used to make clothing!

PTOA Readers that live in warm climates might not own clothes made of polar fleece. However, PTOA Readers in colder climates know that polar fleece garments are warmer yet lighter and easier to clean than real wool.

“I want to say one word to you. Just one word…. PLASTICS.”

In 1967, a popular movie called “The Graduate” starred a very young Dustin Hoffman as a recent college graduate who was feeling pressure from his parents to choose a career path. In a famous poolside scene, the graduate receives one word of guidance from a family friend to pursue a career in ‘plastics.’

Indeed, working in the petrochemical industry would have been interesting during the late 1960s. The application of hydrocarbon chemistry to explore and commercialize peaceful uses of petrochemicals has grown exponentially since then.

Take a hard look around the room you are sitting in right now and notice the materials of construction for countertops, rugs and chairs. And that paint on the walls is a petrochemical, too! Anything you see that is not grown from a plant or taken from an animal or excavated from a mine or hanging around as a mineral is probably made with petrochemicals.

Are your blue jeans made of a cotton/polyester blend so that they will stretch and give? The polyester was derived from crude oil. Synthetic fabrics like rayon, nylon and Gore-Tex are derived from crude oil as well as the popular fastener known as Velcro.

Petrochemicals also provide the basic components found in toothpaste, shampoos, cosmetics, and many household chemicals.

Even if all modern fuel types could be replaced with renewable alternatives, it is hard to imagine the world without consumer items made from petrochemicals.

Process Safety Management and Petrochemical Industries

Everybody who works safely around petrochemicals is acutely aware of the complexity of process technologies in use to successively rearrange, react, and separate hydrocarbons into very pure components.

Maybe you’ve heard of a company called DuPont? Among many widely used consumer products, DuPont invented Teflon, the nonstick coating on cookware. DuPont also developed the auto paint on Jeff Gordon’s #24 race car.

Most important, DuPont was the trendsetter with regard to developing a systematic approach that integrated process safety into daily operations and thereby instilled a company-wide safety culture. The fundamentals of industrial process safety will be covered in later PTOA segments.

Take Home Message: Some industrial process technology facilities manufacture petrochemical feedstocks. Other processing industries convert these feedstocks into a wide variety of popular consumer products used in United States households.

Photo credit:    www.zebra54.com

©2014 PTOA Orientation Segment 4

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