Please look up the definition of “peak oil” – it is the point at which oil production will be at an all time peak. Since plastic can be made from materials other than oil, peak oil doesn’t mean peak plastic.

Look closely at what is claimed in the article: “But if we’re running out of oil, that also means that we’re running out of plastic.” There are none of the disclaimers that you adding – cost for instance. It is a flat out claim that we are running out of plastic, period.

I continue to be amazed that people are defending Debbie’s statements. “Well, yeah it’s not quite true, but what she really meant was…”

There are way to many other exciting innovations that Discover can write about rather than waste their time on this trash. (pun intended)

John Spevacek, I appreciate your passion and expertise. As K.Jean points out, I specifically noted the cost issue as leading to non-petroleum-based plastics (if you follow the links to “previously unconsidered renewable sources”, you’ll see some more examples). At present, only PE is substantively made from natural gas. As the cost of oil rises, alternate feedstocks will come into play including, as you correctly noted, both biological and non-biological sources. Some of these feedstocks will be used to make the commodity plastics that we are used to. But increasing cost of production (whether it’s raw materials or switchover to different feedstocks) is likely to give us a chance–and an incentive–to reconsider the materials we are making. A small example of this would be the switch from slick white polystyrene to beige, porous biodegradable polymer for disposable cutlery. This is the sense in which I mean that it’ll “be a different world”. Not that there won’t be polymers–which have existed since long before humans, after all–but that they’ll be quite different from what many people currently think of as ‘plastic’.

Do I think it’s possible that alternate feedstocks will come into play at a reasonable cost, so that the world 50 years from now will look exactly the same as ours now, with polyethylene shopping bags and millions of PET drink bottles and ubiquitous disposable PVC containers? Sure. But I think it’s far more likely that the combination of economics and sustainability issues means that all our smart, productive chemists and chemical engineers will come up with amazing new materials, and also effective ways to recycle all the plastic that’s currently stored in landfills.

What applications? Honestly, we can already make PE from sugar (Braskem/Dow are doing that in Brazil), everybody already knows about the plant-based PET bottles that Coke is highly publicizing…Alkanes, aromatics,.. what are we missing? What please, tell me what is so difficult about making plastics from non-petroleum sources?

So first Debbie says that peak oil = peak plastic, but now backs down and says well, only for some unidentified plastics. Is she going to back down from this again when someone further challenges her on these specific plastics?

Do you realize that comments like Debbie’s are saying that all the chemists and chemical engineers on the planet are so incompetent that they cannot overcome this problem? How can you give her any credibility at all in this matter and continue to defend her? It was a stupid statement from the get-go.

How about next time you interview all of us instead of a nay-sayer who has already backed down from her outlandish statement as soon as someone called her out on it?

Peak oil will lead to a big increase in price of all synthetic materials, and coal will be used profitably to sythesize new/old plastics.

In short: general wealth will dwindle.

Georg

Debbie did mention the fact that some plastic is made from natural gas and some from biomass, but she said that some applications would still really demand petroplastic.

A great deal of plastic is produced from feedstocks derived from natural gas, not oil. Shale gas in the US is rich in ethane, which is (when converted to ethylene) gives US plastics makes a competitive advantage.

All plastics could be made from non-oil, or even non-fossil, sources without enormous trouble. Unlike fossil fuels being converted to transportation fuel, the amount of carbon going into plastics is well within the capability of biomass sources to supply.