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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
I'm Sharon Brett-Kelly and today on The Detail I'm in the tradies entrance of a Plumbing World store in Auckland looking at pipes.
All of the fittings, which are bends and junctions and all the other bits and pieces that you connect the bike to, they're all there, they're all plastic.
I'm with Ruben Cutts, Northern Region Manager of Plumbing World, a plumber-owned cooperative. This podcast isn't all about plumbing, it's about how petroleum is in every facet of our lives. Not just the petrol for our car, but in what we wear, what's in our supermarket trolleys, our makeup, even some chocolates. It's in our furniture, our curtains, the heaters we use and, of course, the plumbing.
And right now, the Middle East war is having a huge impact on the cost of plumbing products, with prices set to soar.
Those pipes there, it's a 100mm PVC pipe.
Yeah.
A 35% increase. We've basically had a small increase of 5% as of the 1st of April and another one coming up, which is unfortunately going to be more likely to be around about the 30%. So it's quite significant. Yeah.
I mean, that makes... The whole plumbing of a house or a building.
It does.
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Chapter 2: How is petroleum impacting the cost of plumbing products?
the jobs that are a little bit more nasty.
Yeah, they've got petroleum in them, haven't they?
Then even with our, we've got, I'm holding a copper fitting in my hand here, which is a press fitting. So rather than welding it like we used to back in the day. This is a press fitting, so it's crimped and we've got an O-ring there. So even though that's a metal fitting, we've still got petroleum-based product included in the fitting.
But there's all sorts of fittings, fastenings, there's downpipe and spouting, so it's not just the pipework.
So you buy directly from the manufacturers?
We do, yes.
What are the manufacturers telling you?
Well, they are basically saying that they've got... I'm sorry, we've got someone trying to walk through the aisle. Yeah, we've got a working branch. Plumbers needing gear.
Yeah, exactly.
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Chapter 3: What are the implications of the Middle East conflict on the petroleum supply chain?
We will be looking at a 1 July price increase. And we're also hopeful that within the next four to six weeks, we may get a better indication of where all this will end up. Nothing seems to be moving very quickly in the Middle East at the moment, so there's still a great deal of uncertainty of how long this will indeed go on for.
Is there any danger or risk that you might have to, you know, close your plant or lay off workers?
No, so for us at the moment, our key, the first issue, I guess, was ensuring supply security. Now we feel after talking to our suppliers that we're good on that front, at least in the short term for what we can see. So we have some certainty there, at least for the next quarter. So then beyond that, it's very difficult to forecast
what may continue to happen in the sort of longer term six to 12 month period for example if the Strait of Hormuz remains closed what impact that has on supply lines and in fact pricing and what impact that'll have on our general economic environment and whether those residential and commercial construction projects that maybe were marginal may not go ahead
And when you talk about some of those big projects where you are supplying your customers, what are they?
You could be looking at anything from a new house, a subdivision, an apartment complex, a hotel, the airport development. There's plenty of commercial and residential sort of projects that are happening. My concern is that all these type of
Economic impacts that we're faced with have an impact on the cost of building and ultimately slow down some of the projects that may have gone ahead and the decisions may change in terms of whether they progress or not.
Auckland University Professor Brent Young teaches chemical and materials engineering. He's working with some of our largest companies, including Becker, NZ Steel and Fonterra, on projects that don't use fossil fuels. He says petroleum-based products are everywhere, but he's optimistic, even excited, about what's ahead.
You may have heard the term petrochemical. That's the chemical term refers to a lot of the plastic materials that we use in our daily lives. For example, we're talking on a computer, which, of course, the electronics, et cetera, are made out of silicon and copper and steel and so on. But there's a lot of plastic that goes into the manufacture of a computer, say, or a mobile phone.
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Chapter 4: How much of our daily products are made from petroleum?
And it's not just the industry. We can't say it's a big, big industry. They are providing products that we, the consumers, all want. So, yeah, it's a wicked problem.
How much of our food does have petroleum-derived product?
I would suspect a very small amount of our food would actually have petroleum-derived product. Where it's used is petroleum is used as a source for energy. So industry process heat for utilities for heating stuff up, and we need to do that in food processing. For example, Fonterra, to dry milk, to produce milk powder and send it overseas, requires a lot of energy.
Currently, a lot of that, industrially, all of that energy comes from fossil fuels. So that's the energy component of food and other products as well, which is affected. If we are using diesel from overseas as an energy input into processing or in transportation or other production type operations, I'm thinking of something like forestry, for example, then that whole sector is obviously at risk.
And just getting back to household, what's in our households that, you know, in our typical day, I guess it is kind of everywhere, isn't it? Like cleaning products, would that have any kind of petroleum?
Yeah, absolutely. Actually, if you even think of the container that the cleaning products come in. So we're all familiar with the terms of, you know, our plastic types, you know, polyethylene, polyvinyl chloride, PVC, most people would know it as. Those are polymerized products from petroleum.
They're secondary processing that takes the chemical produced from refining of crude oil and then further reacts and refines it to produce the plastic products.
So if it's not in the products, it's in the packaging of the product?
Correct, yes. And packaging is a big thing, of course.
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Chapter 5: What alternatives exist to petroleum-based products?
For example, fleeces, anything with synthetics, polyester, again, is a synthetic product. It would be sourced from petroleum.
what we sit on, the curtains that we use. Then we come to cosmetics and perfume. It's in your lipstick. I mean, obviously it's not dangerous to have it in small amounts in products.
Yeah, I guess you're probably getting into the area of microplastics. I guess that's the other aspect that, you know, why microplastics are prevalent globally. It's been found in the depths of the ocean and actually at high altitudes. So basically at micro scale, you're producing these microplastics, which can also have potentially harmful effects.
Is this going to prompt some really serious thinking about our manufacturing processes and our heavy dependence on petroleum? Or have people like you been thinking about that for a long time?
Hopefully both. I think it's made the public more aware. You know, it does take a crisis quite often to bring them into sharp relief. But there have been a lot of people doing research and developing products that are alternative, say, bio-based products, so more natural-based products that can replace these products.
Scion, for example, now Bioresources Bioscience Group, have actually produced plastic alternatives that come from, you know, bio-based materials. and have been doing a lot of research on that for several decades. I've been involved recently with a PhD student who's been looking with industry, looking at sustainable carpets.
Even if you have a wool carpet, the backing and the adhesives may include petroleum products.
What would be an alternative?
The challenge is getting a reliable biobased solution, often going back to the original materials like jute, which is a kind of a flax derivative for the adhesives looking thing, natural rubber derivatives of that, which are non-petroleum sourced. So it's a challenge, but it's quite an exciting challenge if you're a scientist, because there's lots of work to be done.
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