

Peak plastic - DiabloD3
http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=13968

======
jdietrich
Peak oil doesn't mean we run out of oil, it just means that the cost rises to
the point that it's no longer affordable for most uses. Production is unlikely
to decline for many decades, it's just that demand for energy is growing
rapidly while production is static.

At $20 or $30 a gallon, oil is completely unaffordable as a fuel but still
perfectly viable as a raw material. Obviously we'll substitute out other
materials for the least important use-cases, but we won't have to radically
rethink the manufactured world. According to the DoE, plastic production
accounted for just 4.6% of petroleum consumption and 1.5% of natural gas
consumption in the US.

The costs of all raw materials are rising, many of them much faster than the
price of oil. Many metals have doubled or tripled in price over the past few
years. Commodity foodstuffs have surged in price. Quality hardwood is
increasingly scarce. We fetishise oil, but we have a generalised resource
problem due to the rapid improvements of living standards in the developing
world. There are only three plausible scenarios - people getting used to
consuming much less, the development of nuclear fusion, or a third world war.

~~~
acqq
> There are only three plausible scenarios - people getting used to consuming
> much less, the development of nuclear fusion, or a third world war.

And from three scenarios, the second is at the moment impossible because of
physics and the first because of current state-of-art of economy and politics.

Note that those that claim there's "enough energy" for at least 100 years
always calculate "at current consumption rates" which means "no growth"
whereas economists and politicians both assume steady growth. As soon as you
include the "measly" (from the politicians view) growth of only 3% per year
you have to expect _double_ consumption in only 25 years, _four time_ that in
50 years, _eight times_ in 75 and _sixteen times_ in a 100.

~~~
sliverstorm
_And from three scenarios, the second is at the moment impossible because of
physics_

Even if it was possible, who knows if we could even get them built. I half
suspect we (as a country) will pick WWIII over nuclear reactors, we're so
afraid of them.

------
tdr
The bigger problem is the medication sector which is based on the
petrochemical industry (eg. aspirin). I'd rather eat on wooden plates than
stay with a head-ache. probably even more life-indispensable drugs are made of
petroleum.

[http://www.google.com/search?q=Pharmaceutical+drugs+made+fro...](http://www.google.com/search?q=Pharmaceutical+drugs+made+from+petrochemicals)

Plastic is easily replaceable with cleaner and healthier materials (glass,
wood, ...) Not everywhere, but on the basic necessities for sure. Also, we
don't need to use new storage materials every time, but reuse more quality
ones.

~~~
tjic
> I'd rather eat on wooden plates than stay with a head-ache

As a hobbyist wood turner who makes my own wooden plates and bowls, I suggest
that eating off of wooden plates (or "treen"
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treen_(wooden)> as it was called) is actually
kind of nice. It takes no more time to wash, the texture is earthy and solid,
it's hygenic, and it makes you feel in touch with your environment.

(NOTE: I'm not a crazy hippy. I write Ruby, build CNC machines, and look
forward to living in the asteroid belt some day...but it's still aesthetically
nice to use stuff that has a personal imprint and local texture to it)

~~~
tdr
> it's hygenic

That's the main point for me

------
tocomment
I see no reason we can't make plastic out of biomaterials like corn.

By the way, I never understand why they don't make roofs on houses out of
plastic. It seems like they'd never degrade or leak, and it would be faster to
install.

Are shingles really that cheap?

~~~
jws
There are premium roofing shingles and tiles made from plastic. If you see an
unusual color of slate roof with regular shaped tiles or a repeating pattern
of a couple feet, you may be looking at one.

Cost wise, they fall between asphalt shingles and clay tiles or slate (that's
a big spread). They can last better than asphalt and should need fewer repairs
if you live in a hail or extreme wind area.

Here is a project that got plastic slate recently.
[http://www.professionalroofing.net/webexclusives/webexclusiv...](http://www.professionalroofing.net/webexclusives/webexclusive.aspx?id=262)
The extreme labor cost and difficulty of access to repair justified the extra
material cost.

~~~
brudgers
Slate roofs are made from slate, not plastic.

~~~
lmm
But people don't always see what's really there

------
Roboprog
Wow. Sounds like a slightly less dire discussion of the sort of things that
James Kunstler is always discussing on his site.

<http://www.kunstler.com/index.php>

I think Kunstler's site is a bit over the top, but it's an interesting "ha ha,
only serious" view of peak oil.

Things like this peak plastic article remind me that we better get to work on
crazy stuff like fusion or orbiting solar powered microwave transmitters (to
run Google's asteroid mining data center, of course) if we want to avoid a
long slow decline into another dark age.

~~~
Tuna-Fish
Fission power is good enough to avoid any decline. We just need to start
building more of it...

~~~
crpatino
Except we would hit peak uranium pretty soon, and be left with a bunch of new
reactors that never got close to pay back the investment it took to deploy
them. Not to mention the poisonous, radioactive debris to deal with for a long
long time afterwards.

I would be much happier if we committed those resources to maintain the
nuclear infrastructure we already have in place, to keep it going safely for
as long as possible.

~~~
Tuna-Fish
> Except we would hit peak uranium pretty soon

We will _never_ hit peak uranium. The "exploitable uranium resources" numbers
floating about are for deposits that would be commercially exploitable roughly
at present prices. The thing is, the cost of the raw uranium is a very small
proportion (less than 0.05%) of the cost of running a fission plant. In other
words, you could multiply the market price of uranium by 1000 times, and it
would only increase the cost of running the plant by 50%.

But, well before that, it becomes cost-effective to separate uranium from
seawater. Where we have enough for tens of milennia. If that runs out, it then
becomes cost-effective to _mine and refine nuclear fuel in space and return it
to earth_. At present-day launch costs. Peak Uranium will never happen.

And if it somehow did, thorium is roughly a thousand times more plentiful than
U-235.

------
Lost_BiomedE
Odd. No mention of natural gas? In the U.S., the most common plastic
(polyethylene) is made from natural gas.

------
redwood
The thing is, of the oil taken out of the earth, what percent has been used
for plastic? I'm not sure but a very small portion.

Now even if we're at peak oil _now_ which is certainly not necessarily true,
the Hubbert Curve (where the definition of peak oil comes from) shows that
peak occurs when 50% of the oil has been extracted.

Thus we can assume we have at least half the oil available to humanity not yet
extracted (let alone all the non-traditional oil techniques like tar sands
which boost reserves by an order of magnitude).

My point is that while the price of oil will go up as supply can't keep up
with demand, we are nowhere near being in the position where oil is not
available for materials. We're also nowhere near being in a position where
oil's not economic for materials, because as plastic, oil is arguably very
valuable.

Sure we may reach a point where oil's primary value is as plastic, once we
solve the other-energy-source challenge. But we don't need to worry about
running out of feedstock for plastics, and we certainly won't need to excavate
old landfills for the stuff. At least not soon.

~~~
dkastner
The $1000 question is what the downside of the curve will look like. Will it
be a sharp drop-off or a long plateau and decline? It's looking more like the
latter at the moment.

~~~
redwood
The latter because if the stuff's down there you just need to add ever more
pressure to get it out, but this happens in a smooth way

------
alephnil
Plastic is one of the most valuable things that can be made out of oil, and
one of the things we will still use oil for when its availability is limited,
simply because the utility per barrel of oil is much larger for plastic than
for fuel.

Thus we will likely commute shorter distances before we cut down on plastic,
though we may use fewer disposable plastic products than before.

------
ix_
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemp_plastic>

Why aren't we already using hemp for plastic, paper, etc?

------
kijin
Well, we'll probably find out a way to synthesize plastic out of other
materials rich in hydrocarbons, like algae. It's going to be pretty expensive
at first, but I can see biofuels occupying their own niche even in an economy
that is dominated by hydrogen or some other "clean" resource.

~~~
redwood
Considering plastic doesn't have the CO2 emissions that oil-for-fuel does,
there's no reason to use non-oil-based plastic any time soon. We can move off
oil for fuel and keep using it for plastic!

~~~
sliverstorm
Well, the biodegradability of oil-based plastic is poor, and we might find
bio-based plastics with other such compelling properties.

------
lightweb
Convenient how you completely sidestep the issue of endocrine disruption, BPA,
massive toxicity in the environment, or how plastics affects the human
physiology.

Toxic, oil-based plastics can not go away fast enough. You chemists have been
poisoning humanity for far too long and now you seriously want to advocate
using them more instead of looking for alternative solutions?

You are a part of the problem.

~~~
pavel_lishin
Without plastics, I'd probably be dead right now. So, at least for my personal
case, it's a worthwhile trade-off.

