Map the Supply Chain Paper

My significant other and I recently decided to watch a documentary that changed our outlook on an item everyone uses every day, plastics, specifically plastic bottles or bags. In the Pacific Ocean there is a place called the plastic island. This place is a generalized area near midway where the currents drag plastic bottles and other plastic items into. It’s a lull in the middle of the ocean where they all collect. Tons of plastic, from bottles to bags to buoys and computer monitors that are plastic float to this area and are collected onto the beach and piled up. They affect the wildlife, and kill coral reefs. Plastic bottles are one of the most widely used items today to make up all our soda bottles, water bottles and other consumables and we end up using them quick and throwing them away only to pollute the environment. I will map out each step in the supply chain of the water bottle industry.
The first stage where all plastics come from is petroleum, though there are other options available the basic form of making plastics comes from petroleum, this is drilled out of the ground mostly from oil platforms in the ocean. At this point all the oil that is pumped out is stored on the platform or piped across the sea floor to a holding tank. The oil is unrefined petroleum oil that can be used for a multitude of products though it needs to be refined and impurities taken out to make it into those products.
The next stage of the supply chain map is to take the oil to refineries where it will be segregated based on the requirements of the final product. This is commonly done today with giant oil tankers. The oil is shipped from the Middle East or Alaska or the gulf coast to oil refineries around the world. There are 2 here in California, one in the San Francisco Bay Area and one in Los Angeles, near me. At this point the oil is pumped into the refinery where a process begins of pulling out all the impurities and segregating the final refined product into either gasoline for fuel and other items, but for creating plastic bottles we are looking to use Polyethylene Terephthalate, or PET for short. PET is mostly widely used in the production of plastic water bottles because of the ease of use and strength and its ability to be made transparent or opaque. (Plastic Bottle Manufacturing, n.d.) During this process of refining the oil down at the refinery turns the oil into hydrocarbon monomers.
Next the monomers are sent to a polymerization plant to change them into polymer resins. These resins will be used in the creation of plastic water bottles and are usually seen as little plastic balls. Now we have a product that we can work with to make plastic bottles into any shape possible. At this point there are several ways in which to make plastic products be it Extrusion, Injection Molding, Blow Molding, or Rotational Molding (Plastics, n.d.), but for making plastic bottles we will go with blow molding which is a technique that heats the resin pellets, and pushes the melted plastics into a mold which is then compressed with air which pushes the resins against the walls of the mold making the shape used to make a plastic bottle.
At this stage in the supply chain we have created the plastic bottle and shipped it to the bottling plant who will take the final plastic product and merge it with the filtered, purified water to create the final product. The next step in the process is to apply the label and cap and package them into the individual packages to be sent to the retailer, in this case a grocery store.
Next the retailer will be receiving the water bottle with the producer’s label and packaging and proceed to advertise the product to the consumers, as well as determine the retail price. All of these steps are done contiguously with the development of the water bottle. The advertising plan is set up by the company that produces the product and is negotiated with the retailer, such as when Evian water wants to advertise their water bottles on TV, they agree to a set price with the retailer such as Ralph’s grocery store, and then begin advertising their products and attempting to show the customer how much they need the product while they are shipping the batches of goods to the retailer so as to drive up the demand for the product.
The next stage in the supply chain involves the consumer picking up the product in the store and purchasing it with the retailer. At this point the water bottle is now the property of the consumer and so ends the supply chain map of the water bottle industry.
Water bottles are one of the most widely used products today. We use them for water bottles that can be purchased in the store by companies such as Evian, or Arrowhead, but they are also used in all manner of products from computer cases to automobile panels. All of which are derived from the production of fossil fuels refined into the specific products that we need. The supply chain map for plastics provides a detailed look at the development as production of both the bottle and the distribution and development of advertising of the final product to consumers.

Bibliography
Plastic Bottle Manufacturing. (n.d.). Retrieved from thomasnet.com: http://www.thomasnet.com/articles/materials-handling/plastic-bottle-manufacturing

Plastics. (n.d.). Retrieved from How Stuff Works: http://science.howstuffworks.com/plastic5.htm