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> What's wrong with using tons of oil? It's not being burnt so it doesn't contribute to climate change. Are you concerned that it's wasting the valuable oil that would be better used to power a car or power station?

Instead of having a VLCC bringing crude to a Gulf Coast refinery where a large part is converted into propylene for bottle and cap production, the crude could be kept safely in its original well, unused. If the demand for propylene (et al) is reduced, refiners would alter their production to make less, ultimately lowering their crude intake, ceteris paribus.

>What's wrong with using tons of oil?

Plastics are incredibly useful. Tons upon tons of bottles end up in landfills, oceans, etc. Even with plastic recycling, PET yields aren't 100%. There is only so much oil and eventually the plastics we have will cease to be recyclable.

I'm not trying to say that it's wrong to use a disposable plastic bottle from time to time. There's not anything wrong with having a case of water. But no one with access to clean water should primarily use disposable bottles. It's lazy and shortsighted.

We will never run out of oil, as it can be synthesized from organic waste (basically just by cooking the crap out of it). Right now it's not really a profitable enterprise in competition with ground based oil, but at some point it will be. And it's carbon neutral (as is everything that doesn't involve digging up basically pure carbon and burning it).

Of course, all of your other points are spot on. It is irresponsible to use such a permanent material for so much disposable stuff.

> We will never run out of oil, as it can be synthesized from organic waste (basically just by cooking the crap out of it)

Powered by what? Oil?

What's the efficiency of that? How long are you willing to wait if you don't use combustible carbons?

Supposedly, fueling the process by burning the product is about 85% efficient [1]. Regardless, the point is we will always be able to make plastic, even when the wells dry up. The worst that'll happen is the price will go up.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_depolymerization

Oil is a limited resource that can be used for way more important things than disposable water bottles, such as medical supplies (syringes, IV bags, etc) and durable plastics components. Plastics themselves are a great resource that should not be wasted, not least because of the amount of energy and water it takes to produce them.

Most plastic bottles are burnt, so they do contribute to climate change; the small percentage of bottles that actually are recycled cannot be turned into new bottles --- plastics are always downcycled; recycled plastics are sometimes mixed in with virgin plastic pellets, but it's usually a relatively small amount of the total.

(I'm setting up an educational project for school classes on the topic of plastic recycling and renewable energy.)

Plastic is created with a by-product of diesel/gasoline, so since it is going to be created anyways it is not very wasteful.

Monomers like ethylene are a by-product of splitting oil; you still need polymerization and processing of the polymers (e.g. extruding, moulding, etc).

It's non-sequitur to say that the process is not wasteful because part of the initial work is done to obtain gasoline. Oil itself is a limited resource.

Are we actually experiencing a syringe shortage because there's not enough plastic to go around?

No. But should we only begin prioritizing the allocation of resources once it has become a problem?

If it is correct that it will become increasingly uneconomical to process crude oil, the supply of virgin plastic will eventually decrease. It makes sense to reduce wasteful usage of that resource before that becomes a problem.

this doesn't address the fact that all that plastic will then end up in landfills or in the ocean. within three decades, some models predict there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish. and since we consume those fish, we will likely suffer detriments to our health because of it.

>It's not being burnt

Not for thermal energy, but it is still being heated and the bits of the hydrocarbon chain that are not wanted are going... where? The process still uses energy and iirc most of the world, particularly where manufacturing occurs, is not using renewables. Maybe Nuclear if you're lucky.