The End of the Age of Plastic

Plastic as a word means malleable, but most of us think of an image when we hear the word - a bag, a cup, a container for something, a disposable thing. Plastic however is a petroleum product. Considering that petroleum is a non-renewable resource, we must begin to think of a world without plastic. What is now manufactured as a commodity as insignificant as paper, will sometime become a collector’s passion. Like a grandparent’s remark, “When I was young we walked everywhere,” our present use of plastic will become a curiosity of the past.

It is difficult to predict what might replace plastic as a major material in the future, but whatever that is, we must consider in our commerce driven world, what is can replace it and remain economically possible. We probably already use plastic’s replacement but it has not yet replaced the oil based cheapness of the real thing. Once we imagine plastic as a rare commodity, we have to consider what else in our lives will have changed as an effect of scarce petroleum, including limited short hop mobility, altered work situations, the import and sale of cheap products, alternative heat and light sources. This slow demise of the petroleum culture will cause a major shift in the lifestyle of North Americans. Although we won’t return to a savage existence, we will be forced to subsist on a smaller scale, in a more world conscious way. The items we use in everyday life will also change. Will we return exclusively to stone, wood, metal, glass and plant materials?

The tools we think we need to accommodate our daily lives, will always employ basic materials, either renewable or unlimited. We may presume that light, wind, rock, earth and water are unlimited but not renewable options. What grows on earth is a renewable resource – plants, animals & trees. We will become more dependent on both of these resource options in the future and we will find ways to exploit them.

Plastic may have a different fate. Instead of being the throwaway material of today, it will return to specialized use which exploits it’s nominal value – that of malleability. It is possible that plastic could be used almost exclusively for replicating living things like the human body. Our technology may advance to reproducing simulations of life from cells of anything that lives or once lived. Petroleum products, like plastic will simply become a rare catalyst in the construction of inventions that promise to assist our survival.

It staggers the imagination that the capabilities of a natural gift like petroleum, now squandered in products like shopping bags and trips to will be a thing we as grandparents will speak of with nostalgia.