A study has been made of changes in residual stress distributions caused by weathering in polypropylene and polystyrene. Chemi-crystallization has a major effect in polypropylene and an analysis based on the volumetric changes that occur on crystallization has been developed. Close to the surface, fractional crystallinity changes up to 4% are caused by photodegradation (X-ray measurements by Rabello and White (18)). It is estimated that this would cause a tensile residual stress of similar to 2MNm(-2) to form at the surface if there were no preexisting residual stresses; in the case examined here, the effect of this shrinkage stress was to reduce the compressive residual stress to a small value (<1MNm(-2)). Additional changes caused by stress relaxation prior to completion of chemi-crystallization resulted in net tensile stresses near to the surface of the photo-degraded polypropylene. The changes occur almost symmetrically in polypropylene even if the molding is exposed on one surface only. A similar analysis has been made for thermoplastics in which the changes occur only at the exposed surface, comparing the results with measurements made on a glass fiber reinforced grade of polypropylene. In this case the analysis predicts that the stress changes by 2-3MNm(-2) near the surface, enough to develop tensile stresses up to 2MNm(-2) there if the compressive residual stress at the beginning is fairly small, in fairly good agreement with observed changes. Glass fiber reinforced polypropylene does not relax as readily as unfilled polypropylene and better agreement is to be expected without any allowance for stress relaxation. The analysis for one-sided chemi-crystallization allows calculation of the resulting distortion in terms of the curvature : this was estimated at 0.33 m(-1), compared to the measured value of 0.44 m(-1). Volumetric changes also occur in noncrystalline polymers and a similar analysis based on data obtained with polystyrene (17) confirms that these changes can explain the observed development of tensile residual stresses on weathering. In the example studied here surface stress changes of 2-3MNm(-2) are predicted and this accounts for a large proportion of the change in residual stress obtained by direct measurement.