Chemistry Home and Daily Living

       The chemical industry, manufacturing cleaning products, personal care products and care for children, developing materials for building appliances and enabling optimal food preservation, has contributed decisively to facilitate housework. In primitive economies, engaged 16 hours a day for basic needs, and in the modern world, only two, due to detergents, easy to iron clothes and clean, or frozen foods, for example.

       Starting with the kitchen, she found coated plastic utensils that do not adhere food containers and furniture of the same material, ceramic plates, transparent wrapping films, skid pans, canned and prepared foods internally protected against the effect of fungi and bacteria.

If we move to the living room there are TV, video, audio player, CDs, and tapes ... all made ​​of chemical materials from the lining of the television screens, to magnetic media, passing compact discs.

And in all rooms are chemicals derived elements: carpets, upholstery, fabrics, stuffing pillows, soap, perfume, paint, adhesives, toys, detergents, insecticides, cosmetics ... Look around and find some object for which component not chemistry has played an important role ... and this exercise will be repeated in the plane, car or on the street.

        The chemistry we dress for every occasion: go to the field, swim in the sea, play sports, climb a mountain or go to a party. Natural fibers are difficult to modify and produce a relatively inefficient manner. Synthetic fibers can be altered to meet specific needs and are produced in large quantities easily. In addition, natural fibers are not as natural as they seem. Did you see the wool as the sheep produce, or how is the cotton, having no chemical protection is attacked by a plague of beetles?

      Chemistry also helps us gain higher yields in the use of food, allowing its storage and refrigerated transport, preserving their properties and extending their life, both in slaughterhouses, as in department stores, shops, and Finally, domestic refrigerators and freezers. All these devices work with cryogenic gases "clean" and are thermally insulated with synthetic foams.

Finally must be mentioned the enormous importance of packaging manufactured chemicals for food preservation. These innocent-looking containers are admirable technological pieces. They should be light and strong, and there composed of numerous different film layers, each with specific properties and functions. The selective permeability to gases such as carbon dioxide and oxygen and to moisture and light, polymer-based materials has been used to develop packaging inside a modified atmosphere. If barrier properties are suitably selected, a packaging material can maintain a modified atmosphere within the container, extending the "shelf life" of the product.

Dehydrated products must be protected from moisture during storage. Fatty foods must be protected from the air to reduce oxidation. The fresh fruit, by contrast, must breathe, and it is necessary that the gases circulate container. For all these needs, sometimes contradictory, chemistry has the necessary materials.

        It is also important to highlight the importance of plastics in reducing packaging waste. Because of its strength and light weight allow to develop the main strategy, which consists of the reduction at source, on the other hand paying for recycling and reuse, thus showing their eco-efficiency.

       I think the chemistry is really important because it is in everything we see constantly in our daily lives, so it is very important to teach. But teach it from this point of view, students can see that chemistry is tangible, is, that exists in the life of each one of them, not a scientifically unattainable world. How about you?, Would not it be much easier and fun for our students bring to reality what we teach?, How do you think you could teach chemistry and life at a time?