In business practice, miracle plastics aren’t miracles. Since its coming of age in World War II, replacing parachute silk with nylon and making ship wiring safer, the modern plastics business has muscled into the world of older products for six brilliant decades. Plastic has successfully dislodged rubber, wood, wool, cotton, leather, paper, glass, metals, even concrete. According to Thomas Swift, chief economist of the American Chemistry Council, the $310 billion global plastics business spans the world’s major industrial regions, including Western and Eastern Europe, Asia and North and South America. It is just as vulnerable to shocks–from oil cartels, refinery fires, hurricanes–as the oil from which it springs. If the industry is starved of fossil-fuel feedstocks, it will change, with a speed and intensity that depend on the scale of the shock. Here is how the scenarios might unfold, starting with a mild rise in price.
PRICE BUMP Too weak to pass on their costs to consumers, small boutique plastics makers throw in the towel. Niches dominated by smaller manufacturers are hit hard: Vinyl flooring gets noticeably pricier and is available in fewer patterns. Vinyl siding jumps in price. Lavish all-plastic bubble packaging contains much more cardboard. No more plastic Christmas trees. You can have an aluminum one. Plastic garbage bags get thinner yet.
HARD JOLT Prices rise sharply for discarded plastic bottles. New-home construction suffers from a supply pinch in PVC sewer pipes. A host of plastic knickknacks once too cheap to bother over, like promotional pens and key chains, mysteriously disappear. Clothing soars in price, especially top-end acrylic-spandex blends. There’s major trouble in sporting goods: racquets, helmets, high-performance gear. Hemp sneakers are declared “in.” They seem OK until you actually try to run in them. Good old duct tape just doesn’t seem to work the way it used to. Meat comes wrapped in paper.
TRAIN WRECK Petro-plastic companies relocate offshore, closer to the working wellheads. But political, military and shipping instabilities destabilize the industry. Hospitals demand rationing for plastics critical to public health, including gloves, hypodermics, drip bags and some oil-based pharmaceuticals. The military demands allotments of Kevlar and high-impact engineered polycarbonates. Floor waxes are made of wax. New record stores pop up–in the business of buying and melting down old vinyl records.
Laptop fires soar as the supply of nonconductive plastic insulation and adhesives dries up. Turmoil in the supply chain means that the more high-tech plastics–electronic polymers, thermochromic inks–are too difficult to make, and the simpler forms grab market share. Among artificial fibers, basic rayon becomes king, nylon and Capilene hang in there, while Orlon, Dacron, spandex and various other acrylics vanish. Wonderbras and wondergirdles from the pre-crash era become precious relics, while “ancient ancestors of plastics” such as Bakelite make a comeback.
In response, there is a feverish effort to replace the fossil fuel in plastics with the cellulose grown in bamboo, sawdust, sugar cane and switch grass. Rubber has always come from tree sap, but now green oddities like algae, ironweed and milkweed get mined as industrial raw materials. Innovators respond: biotech corn and soy plastics really take off. New post-oil materials have outlandish, dot-com-sounding names: Zelfo, Maplex, Biomax, Plantic, BioTuf, Ecoflex, Cereplast. Exotic contenders like aerogel and nanocarbon foam are stealing plastic’s high-performance specialty markets. Newfangled biotech papier-mâchés are far stronger than any seen before.
CALAMITY The greenhouse effect starts subsiding as a major world energy crisis sets in. Plastic product shells are adulterated with cheap fillers like sawdust and glass fiber. Poor-quality recycled plastics can’t hold bright dyes. So in this time of distress, plastics are mud-colored or black.
Coal is mined for plastic feedstocks, using the Nazi-era Fischer-Tropsch process. Fuel, lubricants and anti-freeze have first call on scarce resources. Urban dumps are mined for methane gas, a plastic raw material. Fishing trawlers drag shoals of floating plastic from the mid-Pacific. Post-plastic consumer items are much fewer, heavier, rarer and more pricey.
Thanks to the booming ethanol-fuel business, alcohol is incredibly cheap. The same refineries that make ethanol can produce booze from lawn clippings for the populace, gloomy in the dim chill. Air travel is risky and expensive; lightweight aviation composite materials are no longer manufactured. As in Castro’s Cuba, plastic shopping bags are valuable objects, re-used repeatedly as gift-wrapping, shower caps, pipe sealers. The shrunken petrochemical business concentrates on survival issues: fertilizers and fuel. Millions of tons of scrap plastics are melted in cracking plants and then condensed into low-sulfur diesel fuel. Plastic, the child of the fossil-fuel business, has to serve as fuel when its parent is no longer around.
LIFE AFTER PLASTIC The storm is over. A new day dawns. This is a world with no Styrofoam, no Rubbermaid, no Tupperware. It is a post-plastic, biomimetic, green, sustainable world. Its materials have the colors, weights, textures, sights and sounds of bamboo, sawdust, corn, bone glue, cane and cardboard. But they’re not organic. They’re high-tech superorganic: disposable toys and tools now rapidly turn to compost. The older plastics are fossils; the new “plastics” have learned to mimic the living. It’s still a plastic world, but just like the world that surrounds it, this is a plastic world that is naturally colored, nontoxic and made at room temperature. It’s generally dirty-looking. It always smells of mild decay.
