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.
Cost is a big one, so is ease of use.
My company had been trying different recyclable material to replace some single use material containing plastics. It costs more money, its harder to get working on the machines so we have more downtime which also increases costs, and through the set up process we end up wasting more of the recyclable material than the plastic based materials, so have to spend more money to get a greater supply of the environmentally friendly material needed to do the same job
The fact plastic doesn’t biodegrade is only a bad thing after you’re done with it. Prior to that, it’s often the reason plastic was chosen as the material.
In the real world, decisions are made that have to account for more than a single factor.
Plastic is very useful. In many cases, replacement for plastic consumes a lot more material and labor. There are even cases, when there is no feasible replacement for plastic.
For example, we could consider replacing plastic bottles with glass. Until you run the life cycle analysis and discover that glass requires a lot more energy to produce. Glass is so heavy that the amount of energy used to transport glass containers will offset any fossil fuel use avoided by replacing the plastic with glass. So it sounds really great but it is actually worse for the environment ultimately.
And there we have other competing tradeoffs – do we think it is more important to reduce waste or do we think it is more important to reduce the energy/fossil fuel footprint?
Or perhaps we can talk virtuously about doing without? We could then make it so expensive or infeasible through policy (ban plastic?). This “sounds” great until we notice that this raises the cost of goods or reduce availability of goods so much so that the less wealthy are impacted very negatively. Again a tradeoff.
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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