If oil is a limited resource and plastic comes from oil,how are we not facing a plastic shortage?
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We’re actually having an histology wax crisis in the uk because of the shortage of oil in Europe. It’s made of paraffin.
We might at some point face a oil-based plastic shortage, however we do know how to make plastics from other raw-materials than oil. PLA is for example a common plastic used in 3d-printing
Edit: spelling is hard
The two basic reasons is that plastic is made from the byproducts of some hydrocarbons which we use for other reasons, and we have plenty of this kind of byproducts because we use a lot of hydrocarbon-originated products for other purposes. The second reason is that plastic is a very light material, and from small masses of hydrocarbon byproducts we are able to create very large plastic objects. It doesn’t take a lot of the thing to create plastic objects.
Mildly interesting fact – in the Alien franchise the Nostromo, the ship that originaly encounters the alien, is a refinery ship. The need for oil arrises exactly for the reason you point out, oil on Earth is gone and something along the lines “we have much sooner learnt to use alternative energy sources than stopped our reliance on plastics”.
Is a good question actually. Or rather foresight. ☝️
Burning oil is an absolute waist. It takes very; very very, long time to be created.
We could build entire cities and, basically almost everything we would ever need, forever, if we didn’t burn it.
Recycling it is only necessary so that it doesn’t end up in the biosphere. In which case it would be better to burn it I suppose.
We aren’t necessarily facing ‘shortages’. But! Cost of plastic has gone up nearly 80% in the past year and a half. Speaking for HDPE (High Density Polyethylene), at least.
As an aside, there is an absolutely ginormous plastics plant being built in Pennsylvania.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/12/business/energy-environment/plastics-shell-pennsylvania-plant.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_Pennsylvania_Petrochemicals_Complex
https://stateimpact.npr.org/pennsylvania/2022/06/17/as-shells-ethane-cracker-nears-startup-people-are-surveying-the-ohio-river-for-plastic-nurdles/
On top of everything else mentioned here, we are nowhere even close to having a shortage of oil. There are still gargantuan untapped reserves out there that have been drilled and then capped off to just sit until they are needed. The oil companies just keep production at a profitable rate
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