I walked into my neighborhood drugstore yesterday and was greeted by a melamine tableware endcap.
e.g. http://www.alibaba.com/catalog/11037899/Melamine_Tableware.html
People want to put their food on plates made out of melamine?! Apparently it polymerizes too (when combined with formaldehyde, how appropriate). Who knew?
Yeah, its utility as a plastic is the reason why there are big supplies of it laying around that can be illicitly added to food products.
Yeah, I didn’t know that til recently. I need to brush up on my polymer chemistry. I still wonder though if the word “Melamine” has taken on a more sinister connotation in the past year or so. (When I hear melamine now, I think of really sick cats.) I’ll have to take a picture of that endcap to highlight what a large font it was in.