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Love ya, Dino.  But I prefer to trust what I learned in my degree to what good old Google can tell me. "Polymer" = "poly" many + "mer" unit. True, it does refer primarily to hydrocarbons, but anything with a repetitive molecular unit is a polymer - ditto with dimers ("two units" - a lot of proteins are dimers) or tetramers (ditto). |
You're basically repeating what I said. Polymer = multi-molecular chemical. And by the way, you left out monomers - a very important word in polymer chemistry, even though it's no more than one single molecule. But I ask you, what is 2, 3, 4, and 5 without 1?
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And starch is very organic - it's a giant polymer of covalently bonded glucose units, and since glucose is a molecule consisting exclusively of carbon, oxygen and hydrogen, then so is starch.
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Actually technically starch is two polymeric carbohydrates called amylose and amylopectin, which are complex glucose polymers. But for the sake of argument you did correctly describe the basics of it.
I still don't truely understand your implied "more organic than plastic" argument, though.
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Plastics, being crafted from crude oil, and thus primarily long-chain hydrocarbon molecules, are similarly known as "organic" molecules (organic referring to the fact they're heavy in nonmetals and primarily CHON, as opposed to "mineral" like metal oxides and the like).
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Actually, in chemistry, organic compounds are considered to be anything with carbon-hydrogen bonds. That has been established after hundreds of years of argument on the subject, and I'm not about to accept anything else from some post-graduate crammer who's forgotten the majority of what he learned.