Pollution or Peak Oil?

I was on the RSPB Rainham Marshes last week working on a job tackling invasive plant species, and I couldn't help but notice the amount of plastic that was washing in off the Thames. Over the past few years the problem of plastic pollution has been getting a significant amount of media attention but seeing the problem first hand has got me thinking a bit.

As a bit of an environmentalist I'll welcome any steps which might at least attempt to mitigate the damage we're doing to this planet, but the fact that plastic has suddenly been pushed into the public's eye seems a bit odd. When plastic was first produced at the start of the last century, the whole 'non-degradable' thing was one of the initial benefits they sold it on!

But anyway, the point I'm trying to make is that this sudden concern that's being expressed by world leaders, famous ecologists and the media alike is weird. Plastic pollution in our oceans is not something new and was being studied in quite some depth as long ago as the early 90s, but despite the obvious problems that were growing at the time, the world remained indifferent until relatively recently. So whats changed? Call me a cynic, but I seriously doubt that the only issue here is the environment, so its got me wondering whether this has more to do with peak oil - but perhaps not totally in the sense that most understand the term.

Whilst the prospect of running out of oil in the medium term is worrying given that every bit of infrastructure relies on the stuff, we're probably already very close to hitting peak oil regardless. That may be a bit of a misnomer though, Peak oil may ultimately not come down to its finite nature, but because cheaper, greener energy alternatives are becoming viable. Renewables after all make as much sense economically in the long-term as they do environmentally, but either way if oil demand doesn't peak very soon, oil reserves eventually will, and when that happens global instability will inevitably ensue.

So whats this got to do with plastics? Well mainly because plastic, a material modern society relies on for manufacturing practically everything, is reliant upon the refining of crude oil or gas and is in almost all cases a byproduct of fuel production. Whilst only 4% of global crude is currently used for plastic production, given that we are (hopefully) in the midst of a renewable revolution, a significant drop in the production of oil based fuels would also likely cause a significant increase in the cost of plastics (currently only 2% of plastics are bio-plastics from 'sustainable' sources.) I may well be wrong, but it could be that in addition to the concerns for marine life and chemical leaching, the other reasoning for the current anti-plastic rhetoric is an attempt to force firms to develop better alternatives for plastic that can be used in a post-oil society.

A world without cheap, sterile packaging would make many food items harder to transport, and inevitably increase spoilage and wastage. With a multiplying and increasingly urban population, anything which makes transportation more difficult makes feeding everybody on this planet more difficult. Development of biodegradable alternatives to plastic does seem to be advancing nicely, and trials continue with materials ranging from seaweed to tree cellulose, but if they prove to be uneconomical then we may well have a problem. Older packaging like glass would undoubtably be a cleaner option, but the energy expended in transporting heavier items made of glass would up transport costs significantly. (A glass jar constitutes roughly 36% of a product's total weight, whereas plastic is less than 4%.) Then there's everything else made from plastic from car bumpers to cable ties. Without plastic a whole host of items we rely on would be impossible to mass produce.

So whilst the environment is a concern, I'm sure our illustrious leaders are just as concerned about how they'll feed the masses and grease the wheels of the world economy.