A brief spoken segment from a YouTube video by Tom Burton outlining how rising petroleum prices affect more than gasoline: they directly raise costs for plastics (which rely on petroleum-derived feedstocks and natural gas) used in everyday goods and manufacturing processes (injection molding, rotational molding), with wider economic implications.
Chapters
And I think, you know, most people or many people, if not most when they think petroleum prices, they think putting gas in their car. But probably the bigger factor of that is, you know, anything you touch that's plastic is made from petroleum products, right? So whether it's the microphone in front of any of us or whatever it might be in that setting, it the things in our garage that are that are plastic, whether they're rotationally molded plastics, injection molded, those all take two things, right? They take the petroleum products and the pellets that are driven by the same prices that we see at the pump and they take the natural gas that this article describes as well to make. So when we start seeing those petroleum prices rise, then we have the other implications of the economy right now as well. Puts us in a difficult spot because so much of what we touch every day is tied to the plastic side of things.