Plastic: Where it comes from

Plastic comes from oil, and the oil industry is no small operation. In many places around the world, and in the U.S., sites exist where the geologic conditions are such that a gas and oil concentration has been trapped. Upon location of these traps, a hole is drilled and a pipe rammed into the oil deposit. The oil is pushed to the surface due to pressure in its chamber, and also from the weight of earth above. The oil drilling operation, itself, has become a rather small and sterile undertaking. An oil drilling/pumping rig is roughly the size of a house, and very little oil is spilled, anymore. Literally, you could 'mine' oil in your backyard.

At the drilling site, a storage drum is filled, and, when full, the content oil is loaded into trucks, but sometimes piped, to a refining facility. This is where plastic is made.

Plastic comes as a by-product of oil refining, and uses only 4% of the total worlds oil production. It is a 'biogeochemical' manipulation of certain properties of oil, into polymers, that behave 'plastically.' Plastic polymers are manufactured into 5 main types, of which, plastic bags are made of the type known as Polyethylene. Raw Polyethylene comes from oil refineries as resin pellets, usually 3-5 mm diameter, by 2-3 mm tall. The raw material, as it is called, since it is plastic, can be manipulated into any shape, form, size, or color. It is water tight, and can be made UV resistant. Anything can be printed on it, and it can be reused.

Since plastic is so maliable, there are numerous process used to turn plastic into finished goods. To make bags, a machine heats the Polyethylene to about 340 F and extrudes, or pulls out from it, a long, very thin, tube of cooling plastic. This tube has a hot bar dropped on it at intervals however long the desired bag is to be, melting a line . Each melt line becomes the bottom of one bag, and the top of another. The sections, then, are mearely cut out, and a hole that is to be used as the bags' handle is stamped in each piece. Further finishing may be done such as, screen printing, however, for the majority of bags, it's off to the stores, etc., where they will be used.

With the exception of large, fuel burning, heavy machinery, used in the aquisition of oil, the entire plastic bag making process uses only electricity. The electricity used from start to resin/raw material is mostly nuclear. The power used in the bag manufacturing, for the most part, comes from coal fire power plants. One interesting note is that approximately 50% of the electricity generated from coal burning power plants is not from coal at all, it is, in fact, wrought from the burning of old tires, they being made of rubber, which is plastic.