There are many existing alternatives to petroleum plastics, some finding wider uses than others. Some of you may remember those styrofoam peanuts used for packaging, nowadays all I see are packing peanuts made from cornstarch. These work just as well, but are also biodegradable. I also get cornstarch freezer bags.
Plastics is a broad term that encompasses a range of polymers that may be of petroleum or other manufacture. Plastics are an extraordinarily flexible and useful material and we should not really expect that all uses of plastics will disappear. Whether and how fast petroleum plastic products are replaced will in the end depend on the relative economics of the various input streams (as influenced by Government regulation of course and the cost of energy). We are already seeing some petroleum plastics phased out and starch resources replace them. For other uses, we may see non-plastic replacements. That is replacement articles that do not have the properties of plastics. In a small minority of cases, we may simply go back to what we did before plastics came along.
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"How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? Four; calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg." Abraham Lincoln
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