My blogs dealing with the health problems of plastics would be incomplete without looking at the scope of size and importance of the Fossil Fuel and petrochemical industry to the world economy. These are dull but significant statistics but we need to know them to gauge the size of plastic production now and going forward. You have to include all the sectors of Oil and gas production. In the US alone Oil and gas employment in the US was 10.3 million people accounting for 8% of US GDP(source:EIA) Worldwide there is said to be more than 65 million people in the energy sector(IEA 2019). Another important factor is that petrochemical feedstock currently accounts for 12% of global oil demand. This slated to increase to 30% by 2030 in only 5 years. As I mentioned in my blog 5 years ago the bulk of petrochemicals is in plastics by weight and volume. 63% of global petrochemicals by weight is plastics. The remainder excluding fertilizers is non plastic chemicals like paints and adhesives, phrmaceuticals and pesticides,, detergents and cleaners etc ad infinitum.The sectors of plastics are packaging(36%) construction(16%), textiles(15%) vehicles(14%), consumer products(11%) as well as a variety of others in declining parentage including clothing, electronics etc. A recent paper (Iluminem.com 7/25/2024) said that plastics production will TRIPLE by 2060!!!! In 2022 it was 400 Million metric tons with an increase to 1231 MILLION metric tons in only 35 years! I give these terrifying numbers as what we are up against if we want to mitigate the disease disaster we will be facing if these increases occur.
I would invite the reader to look at Google Earth to see the size, impact and location of these companies and I guess I should mention who and where they are just in the US and Europe . Dow Chemical is the gorilla in the room and has plants worldwide with an enormous one at the “Freeport Complex” south of Houston Texas. There are many petrochemical plants all along the Gulf Coast as far as Louisiana run by oil companies like Exxon, Occidental, Chevron etc. One of the Europe’s largest is in Ludwigshavn Germany with BASF. The Port Of Antwerp, Belgium has seven of the biggest ten companies on a sprawling site. I am not even including the new plants in the Middle East and China and Asia or South America. But I digress…..
Returning to the plastic production numbers…... Currently(2022) the world production is 400 MILLION MT. I have been discussing how serious the plastic problem is now with ONLY 400 million MT. The problem if the world TRIPLES production in the next 3 decades is unimaginable and simply must not happen. To get any faint hope of dealing with this problem we will need to at least flatten the curve and perhaps Cap plastic production. This clearly a global issue requiring global policy initiatives, the most recent being the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee meeting in Busan South Korea in late November last year which has been described as a dismal failure to rein in plastic production. I will try to point out what leverage we might have as individual consumers to try to enact policies to limit the health and pollution damage going forward but until we can educate the world population on the extent of the health problem, the situation is unlikely to change. It is said that when a problem cannot go on it will stop. A nuclear world war or an asteroid impact comparable to the Chicxlub meteor strike 65 million years ago would stop the plastic juggernaut and a worldwide recession might slow it. Ultimately since oil and gas resources are finite,when they terminally deplete plastic production will as well. But humans are also finite and if they deplete, so will the need for plastics. The world will certainly be OK in the long run but the human experiment may not be. We may only have a generation or two left to have even a small hope to arrest this looming crisis. We are of course in the midst of a series of intersecting crises like loss of biodiversity, the climate emergency and pollution. I would include the health disaster of the metabolic syndrome which includes the obesity epidemic, hypertension, diabetes, dementia, cancers and CV disease. I will attempt to show how they are related in a systems analysis. To say this is all very very complex is an understatement. In my next blog I will focus on the types of plastics, their source and probable toxicity. Down the line I will offer some suggestions on individual strategies to try to save our health and the health of our unborn citizens.
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