Especially with biodegradable plastic made from cellulose being made available
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Plastic is a “waste” product of the oil refining process. Oil is basically a mixture of fuels, like gasoline and diesel, and sludge. When you remove all of the fuel from oil, what you’re left with is sludge. Oil sludge is toxic and difficult to dispose of.
One of the consequences of this is that the amount of oil byproducts that get produced is really only dependent upon how much oil is being refined – not on how much demand there is for the oil byproduct. If you reduce demand for single use plastics, you haven’t reduced the amount of oil sludge being produced.
Does some of that sludge get turned into different products? Sure, you’ll end with more tar, bunker fuel, and other similar byproducts being produced. But the amount of plastic being produced isn’t going to drop by a huge amount – at best, the price of plastic drops, but its always going to be more cost effective to turn oil sludge into plastic than it is to find some other way to dispose of it. So if demand falls to the point that there is a plastic surplus, that excess plastic is still just going to end up in a dump somewhere.
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