This reminds me a bit of Hank Green's recent video on why we don't recycle plastic. The answer is we frack a lot of methane for electricity and ethane is a byporoduct of that. You can flare it off or use it as a negative cost ingredient for polyethane / many other plastics. As long as we're using lots of fossil fuels the byproducts will be cheap. Anyone who has played gregtech or factorio or similar already has an intuition for this. The answer then becomes simple: if you want less plastic you must use less fossil fuel. They are one and the same.

https://youtu.be/325HdQe4WM4

▲

glitchc 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Isn't that common knowledge, that plastics aren't feasible without fossil fuels?

▲

_alternator_ 6 hours ago | parent [-]

This is different—the cost of plastic goes up if fossil fuel consumption goes down because currently it uses a waste stream. Not sure if it’s true, but it’s different than my prior intuition about fossil fuel and plastic.

	▲	bombcar 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Exactly - a common understanding of fossil fuels is that we could just "use them for planes and plastics" but there would be an unexpected cost there - because the plastics are basically "free" waste products of processing for other needs. It's similar to how car heaters work on waste heat from ICE and have to be accounted for in electric cars.