If oil is a limited resource and plastic comes from oil,how are we not facing a plastic shortage?
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For other reasons listed here, and also because we aren’t burning it en-masse. Supplies of things last a lot longer, and stretch a lot further, when you not literally burning millions of gallons of it daily just to get people to work. You probably burn 2-8 pounds of gasoline just to do an average daily commute, but how often do you buy 8 pounds of plastic? That water bottle is on the order of single digit grams, consumer products almost always use less than a pound of plastic (usually on the order of a couple ounces).
You might say the same about water supplies. Why is drinking water cheap and abundant despite water shortages? It’s because the vast majority of water we use goes to agriculture and industry, and if all our water were represented by a single glass, we humans would like like ants taking negligible sips from it from a global perspective.
Among other things, it’s simply a matter of scale. A single drop looks like a wild shortage to a human, but an endless wellspring to an ant.
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