Plastic
A lifeline for the fossil fuel industry?
Plastic
The fossil fuel industry is facing an existential threat.
Climate catastrophe
Its survival is diametrically opposed to that of the environment, which depends on global commitments to keep oil, gas and coal in the ground to avoid climate catastrophe.
Though the science has long been clear, it's only more recently that governments and industry have started to act.
Countries around the world, including major economies like the US, the EU and China, are introducing increasingly ambitious clean energy targets. The electric vehicle market is picking up pace and 2020 was a record-breaking year for renewables.
Yet the fossil fuel sector is not about to turn its back on hydrocarbons. It has seen a beacon of hope in plastics, an industry to which it already has deep connections.
Sachet
Many oil and gas giants in the trillion-dollar industry are instead betting on items of single-use plastic, such as this seemingly innocuous shampoo sachet.
It, like the hundreds of billions of other sachets produced annually, begins life among the masses of ancient, organic material lying beneath the ground and seabed.
Extracted crude oil
Extracted crude oil and natural gas provide the raw material for around 99% of all plastics. That makes it a lifeline for the fossil fuel industry.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) predicts petrochemicals will drive nearly half of oil demand growth between now and 2050. And some estimates say plastic production could almost quadruple by then.
Petrochemical industry
That implies big business for the petrochemical industry.
Petrochemical plants produce the building blocks for a range of products including fertilizers, digital devices, tires — and plastics.
And it is in these facilities that our sachet begins to take shape.
refined oil and gas
In a series of steps, the refined oil and gas are processed to produce polypropylene and polyethylene pellets that plastic packaging companies can mold into a variety of single-use products.
petrochemical infrastructure in the world
Countries across the world, including India and China, are plowing billions into expanding petrochemical infrastructure. Some of the financing is from fossil fuel companies themselves.
In the US, the expansion has been driven by a fracking boom, which has produced vast amounts of cheap shale gas and left companies searching for profitable ways to use its by-product and plastic feedstock ethane. An estimated $209 billion (€172 billion) worth of investments into US petrochemical projects have been announced over the past decade.
Critics say this trend exacerbates a supply-driven problem: The greater the capacity to create single-use plastics, the greater the incentive for consumer goods companies to make things to sell.
An estimated 855 billion sachets were produced globally in 2018. At current rates of growth, that number could rise to 1.3 trillion in 2027.
Sarisari
It's part of the overall trend toward greater plastic consumption in developing economies. Southeast Asia accounts for roughly 50% of the global sachet market.
In the Philippines, our sachet is just one of some 164 million used every day — which is almost 60 billion annually.
Plastic in the water
In a country where 16% of the population lives below the poverty line, our shampoo sachet is marketed as affordable for low-income citizens. It costs around $0.7 (€0.6), less than a tenth of the price of a bottle.
Sachet-plastic in the water
Yet these sachets, which are often unrecyclable and therefore of no economic value to waste pickers, end up littering streets or waterways.
And when plastic pollution blocks drains, it can lead to outbreaks of diseases such as cholera and provide breeding grounds for mosquitos carrying dengue. If burned, it releases dangerous toxic particles — linked to heart disease and cancer — into the atmosphere.
When left to break down, plastics very gradually become microplastics that eventually leach into our soil, water, food systems and, ultimately, the organs in our bodies.
And those disproportionally affected by the health impacts of plastic are poor and marginalized communities.
Some major players signaled a readiness to help tackle the plastic crisis through the 2019 establishment of the ‘Alliance to End Plastic Waste’.
Recycling
Its members, which include big names from the fossil fuel, packaging, consumer goods and petrochemicals sectors, pledged $1.5 billion (€1.2 billion) to keep single-use plastics out of the environment.
With actors from the whole plastic value chain at the table, the alliance says it is taking a collaborative approach to finding solutions. It has primarily set its sights on improving waste management, which includes recycling.
Our sachet, however, is unlikely to be reborn as something new. Its multiple and different layers make recycling difficult and costly, to impossible.
It's the same story with many other single-use plastic items. Though the amount of plastic produced annually has increased roughly 200-fold since 1950, just some 9% has been recycled.
And while the alliance focuses on waste management, many of its members continue to invest in increasing the volume of virgin plastic products rolling off the press.
Polution
And so, our sachet's journey continues.
Having been blown down streets and into a river that delivered it to the ocean, it has been nibbled by marine creatures, and now lies washed up on a beach a world away from where it began.
The single empty sachet may look insignificant. Yet the process that brought it to life represents a possible future for the mighty fossil fuel sector.
Some argue the industry is taking a risky gamble and that plastic demand will peak far earlier than expected, as societies move toward circular economies.
If that doesn't happen and plastic production increases as predicted, annual global emissions from manufacture and incineration would rise to 2.8 gigatons by 2050 — roughly on a par with India's annual figures in recent years.
Experts say that would lock us into production for decades to come and make it difficult to reverse the plastic crisis.
As for our sachet, it's only a matter of hours before the wind blows it back into the waves and out to sea. And there it will remain for decades to come — an oil industry relic that will long outlast its single-use purpose.
Rubbish on the beach
Methodology
A full list of the sources and studies used in this report can be found here: https://github.com/dw-data/plastic-fossil-fuels.
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