As I mentioned when this most recent series of posts began last week, my intention is to explore in non-technical terms Peak Oil’s impact in our lives. I want to provide readers with some concise, easy-to-read general themes/ideas/food for thought, without getting bogged down in technical details about manufacturing and the like. Some discussions (such as today’s on plastic) will likely pop up in several different posts. All are primarily designed to do one thing: help you to understand how Peak Oil will impact each and every one us in our day-to-day lives.

So let’s talk a bit about plastic. It is estimated that more than 200 billion pounds of it are manufactured each year. Thousands of products (including the computer you are likely using right now to read this) include plastic as a component. We don’t have plastic without a lot of crude oil first….

With that in mind, today I’m going to begin a discussion of this amazing creation by considering a ubiquitous off-shoot: water bottles. (I’ll avoid that part of the discussion where it’s clear that bottled water—minimally regulated as it is—is clearly no more pure than the vastly-more regulated and safe tap water; that it costs us hundreds of times more for bottled water than it does for tap water; or the fact that in “[a]ddition to the millions of gallons of water used in the plastic-making process, two gallons of water are wasted in the purification process for every gallon that goes into the bottles.” [1] There’s some food for thought! Good thing water resources are infinite, right? Right?)

In that just-referenced 2007 article by the Union of Concerned Scientists, it was stated that “[a]pproximately 1.5 million barrels of oil—enough to run 100,000 cars for a whole year—are used to make plastic water bottles….”

The Pacific Institute has estimated that more than seventeen million barrels of oil are used in the manufacture, transportation, and storage of those water bottles. “The amount of oil used for each plastic bottle would equal driving only half a mile. Producing one bottle requires 3 oz of crude oil, and if you fill a bottle 1/3 with oil that’s how much is used in just shipping requirements.” [2]

Estimates also suggest that almost 90 percent of the 50 billion bottles of water purchased in just this country each year wind up in landfills—that’s tens of millions of single-serve non-returnable containers each and every day. If it decomposes at all, that plastic will be there for thousands of years first. This is what we do this planet every day. As I quoted in a recent post: “When are we going to stop behaving so stupidly?”

I’m as guilty as anyone of this shopping foolishness, although in my defense I have now switched to eco-friendly reusable containers, to my children’s likely annoyance. (Just add it to this list, kids.)

In truth, our wild over-consumption of bottled water may be one of advertising’s great successes and a testament to our never-ending search for Damn-The-Costs-And-Consequences convenience, but Peak Oil is sure to have an impact on this lifestyle choice as it will with most other similar choices.

As I and many others have discussed ad nauseum, those who scoff at Peak Oil and cite their chapter and verse about all the fossil fuel resources yet to be produced (and the magic “undiscovered” resources), consistently and conveniently neglect to mention the costs, risks (hello Deepwater Horizon!), energy expenditures, and time delays in obtaining those no-longer-easy-to-find-and-produce resources (assuming they are correct about the size of the resources and the inherent obstacles are surmountable … big question marks.)

What that means in practical terms is that as demand continues to increase (think China and India, among others), supplies simply will not match that pace, and things are going to change. This will be a very long, drawn-out process, despite the false attributions of deniers who claim we believe we’re suddenly going to just run out of oil. But the harsh truth is that as increasing demand collides with decreasing availability, allocations and sacrifices are going to have to be made—sooner than we are likely to be prepared for.

Can we be so foolish as to think that items of convenience such as bottled water will continue to have priority among the thousands of products and transportation services currently utilizing oil/fossil fuels? I’m fairly confident that we can probably find at least a few items that will likely have spots higher up on the rungs of importance.

In practical terms, perhaps manufacturers will continue to provide water in plastic bottles, but surely not on their current scale and just as surely in more costly fashion. The “convenience factor” will certainly take a hit. Less production and more production costs mean less demand, which leads to less production, which costs jobs, and the dominoes in that industry will begin to tumble too. Up and down that supply, manufacturing, advertising, and transportation chain, the decline in demand will be felt. (Again: not an overnight phenomenon, but the decline will begin and it won’t stop.)

Soon enough, we’ll all be “inconvenienced” in one way or another at least several billion times a year because at least several billion bottles of water will no longer be either available or worth purchasing. Fifty billion produced bottles will eventually become … forty billion? Twenty billion? Five billion? More changes, more impact, more people and industries affected. What happens to all those employed in some capacity along that chain?

And we’re just talking bottled water….

Sources:

[1] http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/07/reasons_to_ditch_bottled_water.php: A World of Reasons to Ditch Bottled Water by Union of Concerned Scientists – July 9, 2007

[2] http://greenanswers.com/q/69378/products-shopping/manufacturing-materials/how-much-oil-used-make-one-pla

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/10/watershed-art-installation.php: The US Consumes 1500 Plastic Water Bottles Every Second, a fact by Watershed by Petz Scholtus, 10.15.09