Fossil Fuel, Plastics, and Us
Plastics, useful byproducts of petrochemical industry are derived mainly from crude oil around the globe. Other than this, natural organic materials such as cellulose, coal, natural gas, and salts are used for manufacturing of plastics worldwide.
Crude oil, the most valued material in the globe, was formed millions of years ago from the remains of sea animals and plants, and therefore says as fossil fuel. Marine animals and plants that died millions of years ago sunk in to the seabed or ocean floor were decomposed and mixed with the silt. The remains were buried under layers of sand and silt on the seabed. Due to the deficiency of oxygen, bacteria were unable to decompose these completely. The partially decomposed remains, overtime formed into a large mass. This over the course of millions of years was covered by multiple layers of sand, silt and mud. As the depth of the sediment layers built up so did the weight of the sand and silt pressing down on the layer of partially decomposed remains causing it to be compressed into a thinner layer. Whilst the mud and silt layers become heavier the forces applied causes the bottom layers above the crude oil to turn into shale. The oil is forced out from its original area of formation and travels upwards through the cracks and gaps in the shale formation until it reaches a new impermeable rock formation called reservoir rock.
Crude oil is a complex mixture of thousands of compounds and needs to be processed before it can be used. Extracted crude oil is separated using fractional distillation based on content substances having different boiling points. By the process crude oil is evaporated and vapors condensed at different temperatures in the fractionating chambers. This separates the heavy crude oil into groups of lighter components. Each fraction/separation contains hydrocarbon molecules with a similar number of carbon atoms. Each fraction is a mixture of hydrocarbon, which differ in terms of the size and structure of their molecules.
How plastics are made from crude oil?
Petrochemical based plastics use naphtha as main raw material. Naphtha is further decomposed thermally and separated. Two main processes that used to produce plastics are polymerization and poly-condensation and they both require specific temperatures pressures and most importantly catalysts. In a polymerization reactor, monomers are linked together to form long polymer chains. Some polymer chains are heavily branched and some are not.
Based on the organic nature polymer has its own properties, while polymer structure and size depending on the various types of basic monomers used to manufacture. These polymers are commonly known as plastics. thermoplastics and thermosets are the main two groups of plastics. While thermoplastics are soften on heating and then harden again on cooling, thermosets are never soften once they have been moulded. Most common thermoplastics are polyethylene terephthalate, Polyvinyl chloride, Polypropylene, and Polystyrene. Common thermoset examples are epoxide, Phenol-formaldehyde, and Polyurethane.
What if?
Based on the requirement of the petrochemicals for the quality of living improvement of people, and as statista website says, the level of oil production is currently at an all-time high, with around 94.7 million barrels of oil produced daily in 2018, while showing only a rapid growth, but not decrease though invented many of alternative solutions.
So this means the quantity of byproducts generated by the processes are/ will be also increased rapidly in future. So if we don’t usedthese byproducts for plastic manufacturing like industries, there will be petrochemical waste management, and storage oriented bigger problems in near future.
What is the problem?
Problem was never and will never lies on plastics. Since the day one that Bakelite was invented on 1907, this valuable long-lasting substance was over exploited, over processed, misused, and wasted in leaner economical manner by people, and the results are plastic polluted oceans, uncontrolled landfills, and many more adverse things for us to bear on.
Though how hard plastic industries were pressed by legal and social entities, how much money governments expend to control/manage waste instead of focusing/ empowering circular economical concepts, and how hard environmental activist tries, until consumers understand that they are the polluters, who was unable to manage their own waste due to negligence and oversight, the unmanaged plastic problem may rise further and will last longer.