Replacing oil

[apedant]

I'm hoping to make use of some of the sciency type people who inhabit FSTDT.

I was talking at work the other day of the obviousness of the need to develop non-oil based fuels and how it's not just a global warming issue (we have a AGW denialist on the team) but a matter of peak oil. I chalk it up as a success as the other guy accepted that with peak oil either having been reached or approaching, depending on what you count as accessible reserves, we need to think about how we will power our vehicles and power stations when it is gone.

This got me thinking though, there's something I've not seen anything about. What are we going to do about plastics? Most (all?) plastics are petro-chemicals, so what are we doing to find replacements for these once there is either no more oil or we accept that the environmental cost of retrieving oil is too high?

If you know a good (and free online) article about this please point me in the right direction, or if you have the knowledge please share it, or this will drive me neurotic.

[Vene]

Plastics use a relatively low amount of oil, so reserves will last longer if we switch away from fossil fuel, we can recycle them, and there's been some work being done on producing bioplastics from atmospheric CO₂.

[Hades]

Plastics can be made from corn, and are being used right now on a small scale. The main reason corn plastic isn't widely used at the moment is because it doesn't recycle well with regular oil plastics.

[apedant]

Well at least it is being thought of I suppose. It seems to be a point that the high profile "alternatives to oil" debate ignores, even a google search mainly came up with ways to avoid using plastics that ignored all the techs only possible because of plastics.

[Oriet]

Here's some articles I found about plastics made from plants.

One in Scientific American that covers some of what's done for it and companies that are researching and switching to them.

Here's a more technical article (but not a peer-reviewed one) about modifying plants to produce polymers for plastics.

Here's an article on plant (and fungal) matter being used for making a replacement for expanded polystyrene used as packaging material (which is also biodegradable as compost or in landfills).

Here's a news article on corporations researching, using, and competing for resources for different plastics made from plants.

The main concern really does come from that most plants currently grown for this end up competing for the same land and workers that are required for food production. Research is being done to use what would otherwise be waste material from plants used for food (such as stalks and leaves), which would then not compete with food production at all. Of course, plastics from plants also has the benefit of reducing the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere, as they draw that it and use that carbon to make their carbon chains, thereby removing it from the carbon cycle, instead of doing it like oil and drawing carbons out of the ground and pumping it into the carbon cycle.