In fact plastic is used as insulation round the copper wires in ordinary electric cables. Yet this year's Nobel Laureates in Chemistry are being rewarded for their revolutionary discovery that plastic can , after certain modifications, be made electrically conductive.
Plastics are polymers, molecules that repeat their structure regularly in long chains.
For a polymer to be able to conduct electric current it must consist alternately of single and double bonds between the carbon atoms. Heeger, MacDiarmid and Shirakawa made their seminal findings at the end of the 1970s and have subsequently developed conductive polymers into a research field of great importance for chemists as well as physicists. The area has also yielded important practical applications. Research on conductive polymers is also closely related to the rapid development in molecular electronics. In the future we will be able to produce transistors and other electronic components consisting of individual molecules - which will dramatically increase the speed and reduce the size of our computers.