Plastic: Is anybody worried???

As fossil fuels begin to diminish, I'm surprised people haven't started getting worried about one of the most common products in the world.

Look around you. Now look here. Now allow me to stop copying the Old Spice commercials....

What do you see? It is definitely a varied image, but one thing that is constant is that you have a product somewhere in your line of sight made out of plastic. Maybe your keyboard, of the mouse, or the Computer Screen, or the computer tower, or the case of your laptop, or your desk...

Now consider how many of these items are reliant on plastic. Now imagine that all disappearing in about 50 years. Now also imagine the price of all these items exploding in about 30 or so years.

Am I the only one who's paranoid about this? Shouldn't we be thinking about new ways to create plastic? Shouldn't we be conserving our plastic and using more paper-based products instead? I am very scared right now...

Now, there is probably a whole secret circle of inventors who have already invented new alternatives: those items made out of corn, electric cars, etc. However, with the absence of one product that almost literally holds our society together, there will be problems.

Perhaps I am getting a little bit too frightened, and maybe with the invention of all these alternatives, we'll still have plastic for an extra 50 years or so, but still: it makes you think about all those cheap toys and un-reusable packaging that get thrown out so easily. (Like that hard plastic used around electrical hardware packaging that may as well have been made in hell, and requires scissors and a steady hand to open).

So, when CTV or GLOBAL or FOX or ABC start talking about a shortage on plastic, I called it first... kind of.