• Question: Is plastic made from oil?

    Asked by philip to Rebecca, Matthew, Laura, Francesca, Andrew on 16 Nov 2014.
    • Photo: Matthew Camilleri

      Matthew Camilleri answered on 16 Nov 2014:

      In short yes, plastic is normally made from oil. There is being a big shift from this using renewable sources, such as Laura project but this tends to be much more expensive and time consuming.

      Oil has been used in nearly everything in the past 50 years, starting from medicines to fuels to packaging, and although we now know that global warming is a problem, we are finding it difficult to move away from it due to its very cheap costs.

    • Photo: Laura Schofield

      Laura Schofield answered on 17 Nov 2014:

      Oil is used for loads of things that you may not think of! There are obvious things like the petrol and diesel for your car but then there are things like medicines and vitamin tablets and plastic bags and clothes and paints and almost all of the chemicals my labmates use!
      As Matthew said, there are lots of projects going on all over the world that are trying to make plastic from plant materials but because they are only on a small scale at the moment, they are not cheap! They could be though. And over the years, the price of oil increases as we run out, so then the processes to make it from plant material will be much cheaper than oil based processes!
      The trouble is that we have spent so long developing methods to make all of the things we need from oil without really considering how much we are using and now we’ve realised that we are running out of it and can’t produce any more very quickly that we are trying to catch up with new starting materials. I believe that we are very close to a breakthrough though! So keep an eye out for the word “bio” in front of different plastics!

    • Photo: Andrew McKinley

      Andrew McKinley answered on 17 Nov 2014:

      Plastics have been historically made from oil. Plastic is essentially ‘long chain hydrocarbons’ (molecules containing only hydrogen and carbon), frequently called ‘polymers’.
      You’ve probably seen the numbers on plastic packaging. Plastic number 2 is PE – called poly-ethene. It is made by polymerising the molecule ethene (C2H4) into long chains: -(-CH2–CH2-)- Typically the raw material ethene comes from oil, and the plastic produced will not degrade at all.

      More and more research though is trying to produce plastics from sustainable feedstocks, to the point where some polymeric “plastic” materials are fully biodegradable.

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