Plastic may be cheap to make and convenient to use, but it comes with a staggering economic cost to the United States — possibly more than $1 trillion a year — according to a new report.
The study, released Thursday, estimates that the economic cost of the life cycle of plastic – from how it’s made, to its conversion into products, to its use and disposal – ranges anywhere from $436 billion to $1.1 trillion annually.
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That figure is likely a significant underestimate, according to Duke University researchers who authored the report.
“We, from the beginning, wanted to focus on the harms and costs of the entire plastic life cycle, not just focus on plastic pollution,” said Dr. Nancy Lauer, a co-author of the report and staff scientist and lecturing fellow with the Duke Environmental Law and Policy Clinic. “That was because there really is this entire life of plastic product that has now-well-documented harms at every single stage that we are paying for. It was important for us to make those harms and those costs more transparent to consumers so that they understand this is not just a problem when plastic escapes into the environment and becomes litter or marine debris.”
The team of researchers was able to explore this concept after the university in 2023 awarded it a small grant. That grant led the researchers to host a workshop in early 2024 that brought together experts from across different fields with experience in analyzing the social costs of plastic from its production to its disposal.
Those experts were given a list of studies examining economic costs associated with plastic’s life cycle compiled and initially reviewed by a team of graduate students. The experts then advised researchers on what categories of studies were missing from that list and whether there was additional research that could be examined.
In the end, researchers reviewed 13 existing studies focusing on plastic’s harms and costs on the environment, human health, and the economy.
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The report breaks down the economic impacts of plastics by several categories, from greenhouse gas emissions associated with plastic production to human health effects.
The largest cost, by far, is human exposure to toxic chemicals in plastics.
Researchers estimate that increased disease and mortality from plastics use is between $410 billion and $930 billion each year.
“These high costs are driven largely by the value of IQ loss and reduced productivity associated with exposure to plastic activities,” the report states.
Exposure to chemicals such as phthalates, per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, bisphenol A, or BPA, and those found in flame retardants are linked to a host of adverse health outcomes, including cancer, cardiovascular disease, reproductive disorders and neurological damage.
Lauer explained that only within the last couple of years studies on the economic impacts of human health-associated harms from plastics use have “really taken off.”
“So that was certainly a category that we, in those initial searches and before the workshop, did not have as great of a handle on, but that research has just really continued to take off in these last two years or so,” she said.
And while studies of the economic effect on human health have come a long way, Lauer said there’s still a long way to go.
“The studies that we found document the harms and costs from exposure to just a tiny fraction of the chemicals that are in plastic. There’s thousands of chemicals in plastic, several of which have known health effects, and several of which we don’t know enough about to know if they have health effects,” she said.
There is also lack of research on the cumulative effects on human health from chemical mixtures in plastics.
“If we take in a plastic particle, we’re not just taking in one or two chemicals, we’re taking in that mixture of chemicals,” Lauer said. “How those chemicals interact together to spur health impacts, we don’t have a good sense of that at this time.”
The report highlights other research gaps, including economic costs associated with plastic recycling and incineration, the effect of plastic on property values, and the cost associated with loss of terrestrial environment.
“When plastics get into the environment, often our first thought is when it ends up as marine debris and the harms that it causes in the ocean, entangling animals and creating these great garbage patches that need to be cleaned up,” Laure said. “Plastics also impact the terrestrial environment. They get into streams and lakes, along our roadsides, and studies have documented that plastics also cause harm to terrestrial animals like invertebrates and freshwater fish. But, there’s not estimates in the literature for that loss of terrestrial ecosystem services in the same way that the literature has begun to document the cost of the loss of marine ecosystem services.”
According to the report, the estimated cost of the loss of marine ecosystem services ranges from $1.4 billion to $112 billion a year.
Other categories and estimated annual costs detailed in the report include the following:
- Greenhouse gas emissions produced from fossil fuel extraction and manufacturing: $6.4 billion to $15.9 billion.
- Increased disease and mortality from oil and gas extraction: $2.9 billion to $31.9 billion.
- Landfill disposal: $2.9 billion.
- Plastic litter cleanup: $9.8 billion to $13.3 billion.
- Loss of tourism: $2 billion.
- Damage to fisheries and aquaculture industry: $88 million.
- Damage to marine shipping: $909 million.
Lauer said that a motivation to make these costs more transparent to the consumer is to highlight that, though products we buy that are made of plastic tend to be relatively cheap, “that’s just the price we’re paying right there on the spot.”
“There’s so many other costs that we may not necessarily realize we’re paying when we use that plastic,” she said.
And while plastics are important for certain industries, including the medical industry, “we’re still using a lot of plastic in places that we don’t necessarily need to be,” Lauer said. “The patchwork of state and local laws on the books are important to reduce plastics on that local and state level, and they’re important to have proof of concept and build momentum towards something that is more comprehensive. But I think what that more comprehensive strategy needs to look like is really focusing on reducing plastics at the source, and that can be through phasing out needless plastics.”
