Leber, R. (2020, March 4). Your plastic addiction is bankrolling big oil. Retrieved March 8, 2020, from https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2020/03/your-plastic-addiction-is-bankrolling-big-oil/
The following article discusses how the increase in plastic consumption has resulted in an increase in profit with oil companies. Petroleum is required for plastic production and the increase in production leads to more money going to oil. A research group predicts that plastics’ consumption of oil will outpace that of cars by 2050. If plastic production continues, the sector is on track to reach the equivalent annual pollution of 295 large coal plants and double that by 2050.
This article does a good job at explaining how the plastic industry is continuing to grow and not in the right ways. It explains the positive feedback loop of creating plastics and how it needs a lot of fossil fuels to make and refine the material. This just shows how plastic is everywhere and it is a growing industry. The fact that the amount of oil used in plastic production will outpace that of cars in a few decades is shocking and saddening. The only way for this to stop is either creating new technology to reuse plastics or to stop using it entirely during the manufacturing process (which is highly unlikely).
I agree that oil companies benefit from the production of plastics however, do they benefit from the efforts to clean up plastic as well? Oil is needed to do both and they are both large fields.