If oil is a limited resource and plastic comes from oil,how are we not facing a plastic shortage?
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Plastic used to only come from oil, but more and more plastics are being made from non-oil sources like corn, and a lot of plastics can be recycled.
Plastic is a by-product of oil refining, which makes it very cheap because there’s an awful lot of it. It’s essentially a waste product from the refining process.
We aren’t facing a plastic shortage, because we aren’t facing an oil shortage either. Eventually when humans stop using oil, we’ll need to develop alternative ways of making plastics – for example, you can make plastics out of corn starch
We only make so much out of plastic because it’s super cheap at the moment. We’ll go back to using wood and metal and glass for more things when we start running out of oil, which isn’t for decades minimum.
Only a small part of the world oil production is used for plastic. So all the efforts reducing oil consumption have been aimed at reducing burning oil for energy rather then reducing plastic production. And while the price of plastic is strictly speaking increasing with increasing oil prices most of the cost of plastic is in processing it rather then the raw materials. So the increase in cost is small compared to the price of the finished plastic.
In addition to this plastic is made from oil because that is the cheapest source of hydrocarbons. Before mass pumping of oil plastic were made from plant materials as it was cheaper. Some plastics are even easier to make from plants such as cellophane and PLA. But in general all plastics can be made from plants or even from captured carbon dioxide. It is just more expensive.
As we’ve all found out due to Putins war in Ukraine, there is no fossil fuel shortage whatsoever. There are vast, vast amounts of oil and gas still untouched, and still available. Peak oil was a myth.
A refinery is a giant vertical pot constantly being boiled, which orders the oil products like a latte macchiato. We are very interested in the top layers,they contain a lot of energy, we use them as fuel, and we also use the lower ones, we make things like asphalt and plastic with them. But as the demand of the top ones is greater than the lower ones, that makes the lower ones a byproduct, cheaper, and not really a pursued product.
We’re still pumping oil out of the ground, and we’re still making gas and fuel oil from it. The material that plastics made from is the waste, and we’re still making lots of that too (more than we can use).
Henry Ford made one prototype car with plastic fenders, made from soybean oil. However, plastics made from soybeans would be more expensive than plastics made from oil refinery waste-oil.
We are. Talk to your local plumber.
PVC and PEX prices have almost doubled in the last few years.
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