There are 8 different steps it takes for petroleum to become plastic. First, the petroleum is drilled and transported to a refinery. Crude oil and natural gas are refined into ethane, propane, and hundreds of other petrochemical products. Of course, fuel for your car is refined through crude oil. According to PlasticsEurope, a multinational plastics-industry trade commission, crude oil is distilled into fractions, which are smaller groups of the components that make up oil; some of these fractions are discarded for other purposes, while the ones that are used to make plastics are then further processed. Of course, this does not have any bearing on their environmentally unfriendly properties: whether its derived from crude oil or from a crude oil feedstock, plastic still takes centuries to degrade