Many social media users had a field day recently when Greta Thunberg tweeted a picture in which the 16-year-old activist was snacking on food in plastic packaging. Activists against the oil industry, the argument went, should not take advantage of the products that come from that industry. Indeed, plastics and plastics pollution is one of the strongest arguments against the oil and gas industry. Plastics take an awfully long time to decompose naturally, and only a small amount of the plastics used on a global scale gets recycled. The problem is serious. Yet blaming crude oil alone for it is inaccurate. Last year, 359 million tons of plastics entered markets around the world. The average portion of the total plastics output that packaging takes up is about 35 to 45 percent . This may well be less than many believe goes into plastics production, but there are even more […]