Bitumen is a crude oil product, and quite nasty material indeed. But it's not really what I was referring to here.
Plastic is very durable but it's quite brittle. A plastic bucket for example can break quite easily and needs to be disposed of responsibly or it'll stay around forever ruining the environment.
Depending on the exact chemical reaction makeup these could very well be considered plastics.
Plastics date back around 3500 years with the earliest plastics being made form egg proteins and other animal sources, Shellac which can and is formed into plastic materials has been used for at least 3000 years and in Middle Ages Europe plastics were made by treating horns and making translucent and transparent plastics form them:
https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/queenslib.wordpress.com/2017/...
One of the first modern plastics was cellulose nitrate which was used as an ivory replacement and was made by dissolving cotton in nitric acid and mixing it with vegetable oil, the solution can then be poured into molds to create the final shape or made into billets that could be machined or carved.
"The invention enjoyed a brief popularity, but the Hyatt balls were extremely flammable, and sometimes portions of the outer shell would explode upon impact. An owner of a billiard saloon in Colorado wrote to Hyatt about the explosive tendencies, saying that he did not mind very much personally but for the fact that every man in his saloon immediately pulled a gun at the sound."
It just isn't made with a petrochemical.
Linseed oil is awesome stuff though. Currently working on some wooden skis, some with woven flax instead of fiberglass and some with linseed varnish & pine tar bases.
How would you describe them except 'plastic'?
> They can be used instead of plastic in many applications but they're still renewable and bio-degradable materials.
Many plastics are renewable and biodegradable.