Vinyl Facts About Desk Pads

It is a popular misconception in our industry and amongst our customers that a vinyl desk pad - or any vinyl product for that matter - cannot be as soft and as pliable as a leather desk pad. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Vinyl is a plastic, but it is unlike other plastics in one very important sense.

You might already know that vinyl is basically a plastic produced by converting hydrocarbon-based raw materials (like crude oil) into unique synthetic products called polymers. What you might not know is that, unlike other plastics, vinyl is also composed of salt.

Discovered by accident in the 1920s by Waldo Semon, the vinyl polymer was unlike other plastic commodities in that it contained chlorine (derived from common salt) in addition to carbon and hydrogen. This not only gave vinyl its flame retardant property, but its soft and pliable nature.

Chlorine and Ethylene

The creation of vinyl is a two step process. In the first step, ethylene and chlorine are combined to form ethylene dichloride which, in turn, is transformed into a gas called vinyl chloride monomer.

The last step, polymerization, converts the monomer into vinyl polymer, a fine-grained, white powder or resin known as polyvinyl chloride, or simply "vinyl."

Once certain chemical additives and modifiers are added, the resulting material -- a vinyl compound -- can be converted into an almost limitless range of soft or hard products.

For more information on vinyl visit:

Vinyl Facts - One Material, Infinite Uses.
Vinyl.Org - The Vinyl Portal.
The Vinyl Institute - A Vinyl Resource

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