The True Cost of Our Addiction to Plastic

Phthalates are toxins that have seeped into our food, water, clothes, and many of the everyday things we use. (luckakcul/Shutterstock)

Commentary

For the first time, researchers have attempted to put a price on plastic’s effects on our health. And it’s quite a price. According to a new study published in the Journal of the Endocrine Society, illnesses caused by plastic chemicals cost the U.S. health care system at least $249 billion each year, or 1.2 percent of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP).

To produce their estimate, the researchers chose to focus on plastic chemicals that people are exposed to regularly and that have well-documented harmful effects. They performed a database search for scientific papers on four specific classes of plastic chemicals. These were:

• Polybrominated diphenyl ethers, which are used in flame retardants, textiles, plastics, and insulation for wires and cars
• Phthalates, which make plastics more durable and flexible and are used in everything from flooring to lubricants
• Bisphenols such as bisphenol A, used especially in food packaging and coatings
• Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), which are used for nonstick coatings for packaging and cookware and in flame retardants

All of these chemicals have been linked to a wide variety of harms ranging from fertility issues to obesity, diabetes, cancer, and brain damage.

The researchers then extracted data about the most commonly used plastics within these four groups, including estimates of their health care burden and the extent to which humans are exposed to them.

The data were used in a simple formula to calculate the cost of each substance to the national economy. For example, if a chemical had an estimated health care burden of $100 million per year and 75 percent of its uses presented exposure risks via plastics to humans, the researchers calculated its health effects as costing $75 million per year ($100 million multiplied by 0.75). By adding together the costs for all the plastic chemicals they considered, the researchers arrived at a final cost of $249 billion per year.

For context, $249 billion is a third of the entire U.S. military budget and about the same as the GDP of New Zealand. That’s a lot of money. But however large that figure may be, in reality, it can only be a gross underestimate of the true cost of our society’s and world’s addiction to plastic.

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More than a century after the invention of the first fully synthetic plastic (bakelite, in 1907), we’re still frighteningly ignorant of the nature of these supremely useful substances. We don’t even know how many chemicals are involved in the manufacture of plastics today, although that number is likely to be vast—in the many thousands, if not ten thousand or more; 13,000 is considered a realistic estimate by many experts.

A new project called “The Plastic Heat Map,” funded by the Minderoo Foundation, attempts to get some kind of handle on our ignorance about plastics. The researchers took a subset of 1,500 plastic chemicals, including well-known chemicals such as bisphenols and PFAS, and searched for relevant studies about their health effects. Although the researchers found nearly 3,500 published studies for the period from 1961 to 2022, these accounted for just 30 percent of the 1,500 chemicals in their sample. The remaining 70 percent of those chemicals—more than a thousand chemicals—have no published safety data whatsoever.

If these results apply to the full total of, for argument’s sake, 13,000 chemicals, then that means we know nothing about the health effects of more than 9,000 plastic chemicals. We don’t even know how or when we come into contact with them.

More than 9 billion tons of plastic are estimated to have been produced between 1950 and 2017, with more than half of that total being produced since 2004, and yet we’re only just beginning to grasp the depth of plastic’s infiltration into our bodies, especially in the form of microplastics and nanoplastics. Recent studies have shown that these tiny pieces of plastic are found in every one of the major tissues of the human body—the lungs, the gut, the blood, the liver, the reproductive organs, and even the brain—and that they’re likely to play some role in virtually every serious illness you can think of: Alzheimer’s, autism, diabetes, gut dysfunction, obesity, cancer, you name it.

Microplastics are also heavily implicated in a global fertility crisis that could result in man being unable to reproduce by natural means within the next 20 years. According to professor Shanna Swan, author of “Count Down,” trends in sperm counts suggest that by 2045, the median man will produce no sperm at all. That means that one-half of all men will be totally infertile and that the other half will produce so few sperm that they might as well produce none, since they won’t be able to get a woman pregnant no matter how hard they try.

What dollar price can we or should we put on the continuation of the species? Such a notion is clearly absurd.

Don’t get me wrong, I think we need to show people just how serious a problem plastic is, and money is one obvious way to do that. At the same time, however, we risk making the problem seem completely abstract and intangible—and therefore unattainable. As Joseph Stalin noted with acid irony, “One death is a tragedy, a million deaths a statistic.” For most people, a figure such as $249 billion just simply doesn’t compute, and that’s before you tell them you’re being conservative by orders of magnitude. Take $249 from a person’s wallet or bank account, however, and they’ll understand the impact right away.

In truth, when it comes to plastic, we’re like the blind men in the Buddha’s parable of the elephant, grasping at the individual parts of an enormity, unable to get a feel for the whole thing. Unless we can find some better way to get the measure of this beast, we won’t have a hope of knowing what it is, let alone what to do with it.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.