The Plastic Problem: It's much worse than you think

Five years ago last month I posted a blog on a global environmental problem just beginning to peek over the horizon:https://cal48koho.wordpress.com/2020/01/07/the-plastic-problem/. In this series of blogs I want to review and expand on that post. I will address the current and looming heal risks to plastics. These health risks are coming about from direct exposure to plastic and its chemicals and from plastic waste accumulating in the environment and even contributing mightily to climate change.. Five years ago the media's environmental focus was on global warming/climate change and the emergence of a strange disease in Wuhan China. My blog has long had an emphasis on energy and sustainability issues, and by energy I specifically mean fossil fuel energy . Most other energy forms derive from fossil energy. What piqued my interest in plastics more than five years ago was an interview with a former oil executive in which he responded to the question of why some existing refineries were being shut down and no new ones being built. I have forgotten his exact phraseology but the gist of his response was that the oil and gas companies were profit driven enterprises and the profit in petrochemical manufacturing exceeded and extended the profit in simply refining the oil into gasoline and diesel. Petrochemicals are of course chemicals derived from oil and gas and he felt it was petrochemicals that would be a dominant profit driver for the oil companies going forward. The most important petrochemical product in terms of tonnage and variety is plastics. The point I need to mention again is how confusing it can be to calculate energy content and cost of energy because as a global commodity they are measured in metric and English units AND in volumetric and mass units. For example a metric ton(2204 lb or 1000kg) of oil or natural gas have similar btus, a bit over 43 million btus. A barrel(bbl) of oil will set you back today $77(2/2025). For that bbl you will get 5.8 million btus. To get the same 5.8 million btus in nat gas you will only have to pay $20. This is about the same spread in cost and btus as it has been for decades and my point is nat gas on a btu basis is a bargain compared to crude oil which is an important issue if you are wanting to produce plastics in your petrochemical complex using  natural gas and refinery fractions. If natural gas and oil were priced in energy content they would both be $77. Natural gas and NGLs(natural gas liquids) or hydrocarbon liquids are the main inputs for plastics production. Natural gas is basically a byproduct of oil drilling and for decades the low value of nat gas meant that the companies just flared the gas to get rid of it. It is still done today worldwide. Because it so cheap, it is a very low cost feed stock to make petrochemicals or plastics which is why oil producing companies and countries are building petrochemical plants instead of oil refineries. Follow the money as my wife Karlene says. Petrochemical plants are sprouting up around the world like mushrooms after the rain with everyone getting into the act, not only in the Gulf Coast but in the Middle East especially. Natural gas production has been increasing worldwide which is increasing Ethane production(C2H6), the most important natural gas fraction for plastic production. In the US we even have dedicated Ethane tankers for export. If you are following along with my drift you may be starting to worry about this Ethane juggernaut. I was worrying 5 years ago.!!! My opinion is that we need to curb Ethane OVERPRODUCTION because it leads to plastics overproduction and over utilization. Later in this blog or subsequent ones I will propose possible strategies to curb and regulate plastics. Because I am a Medical Doctor(retired) I will emphasize what a health disaster plastic and chemical exposure is posing to world health and the environment. You may already be aware of how bad this situation is but it is much worse than you think. If the plastic/chemical contamination of the population and the environment continues on its current trajectory , human and animal life will imperiled, perhaps severely. In future blogs I will  address health risks from plastics and their embedded chemicals, how and where the pollution emanates from extraction, production, utilization and disposal. For the scientifically inclined I will try to show how and where these chemicals act to destroy human and animal health. I will also describe how absolutely enormous the  chemical corporations and countries are to the world's  economies and practical difficulties in trying to curb their influence. I will also try to offer practical actions we can take individually to mitigate or eliminate these harms. The climate environmentalists and alarmists had 10 years of a spokesperson like Gretta Thunberg to draw attention to the climate emergency. We could use someone with that stature right now to confront chemical/plastic toxicity. There are many practical mitigating actions to adapt to  the risks of a warming world. Our warming world is a slow moving crisis on many levels. It is small potatoes to the risks of chemical plastic pollution which has the potential to destroy the health of humans  and animals in  this century by sickening and crashing populations.