An undergraduate laboratory experiment has been developed in which the students extract and analyze the additives from plastic food wrap, Tygon tubing and plastic soda bottles that have been crushed in a bottle return machine. The modifiers are extracted from the plastics using methylene chloride and/or methanol as solvents and the extracts are analyzed by GC/MS. Identifications are carried out by a combination of automated computer and manual library searches and chromatographic retention indices.