I figured out how they can bulk-manufacture 2-part epoxy and explosives out of trash for my post-apocalyptic world -- how do I keep trash from becoming the new crude oil in my setting?

Ok, so, per my day of research yesterday, if somebody gets their hands on the semi-intact ruins of an oil refinery and a junior-level college chemistry textbook, they have everything they need to turn scavenged polycarbonate and nylon into epoxy resin and hardener respectively, and to make a lot of a certain fertilizer (which the algorithm showed me a guy using instead of potassium nitrate in black powder, with convincing results) out of mostly piss and more trash, also using plumbing and catalysts they'd just *have* laying around in oil refineries.

The problem is, this makes whoever makes stuff at the refinery *very* powerful, and whoever controls the trash that feeds it like unto a king. If you're setting your story around Puget Sound, the ruins of Anacortes become an industrial hub that can pump out boats, guns for those boats, and cartridges for the guns on those boats to fire at anyone the people with the boats don't like. You also have fertilizer, which ultimately feeds the people you don't want to blow up with it. A collapsed warehouse full of never-sold Minions toys becomes like the lost city of El Dorado. A crazed hermit's bunker full of piss-jars becomes a prize that puts overpowering ordnance in the hands of whoever can get it to the refinery and pay the Grand Distiller General's tithe.

This is cool and all, but who's gonna use a crossbow or steam-harpoon gun when all the serious people in the setting are just using generationally rebuilt 20th/21st century guns firing cartridges reloaded by the nimble fingers of child trash-monks in the Ordo Blastorum of the Anacortes chapter? Who's going to make an armored raft made mostly from blue plastic barrels and old kevlar vests when the serious people are zooming around in streamlined post-collapse fiberglass patrol boats (also festooned in old kevlar vests)?

I don't want to invoke magic or sci-fi technologies, but...what if there are giant, alien yeti-type creatures that come out of portals and smash things up at night while everyone's asleep, whenever anyone's chemical production capacity gets too far ahead of anyone else's? Would that fix this??? How about a dominant regional religion that hates chemists and convenient weapons?? Alien fungus ate all the polycarbonate during the apocalypse??? Mutant trees that can grow fully formed hulls with no need to seal or reinforce them????

/uj This is mainly a 'get a load of these goofy ideas I had and wanted to share' post, not a reference to anything in particular. And an extremely low-grade dunk on Anacortes, because ya gotta if you live in the area. Like if Port Angeles and a Bladerunner set had a baby, I'm tellin' ya.

>!Incidentally, I think the big controls on how powerful the King of Chemicaltown gets are population density/human resources (you need a lot of people to run your chemical plant, and they've all gotta eat, and you make fertilizer, not farmers or produce), and how large an area they can reliably draw scavenged plastic feedstocks from (which pirates/bandits, things like radioactive craters and minefields, and natural geographic bottlenecks can make arbitrarily small/unreliable/expensive). I'm picturing a narratively convenient patchwork of small and rarely cooperative polities solving any 'problem' that any of this actually poses.!<