# Economic damage of (single pieces of) plastic **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [September 4, 2023, 12:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/economic-damage-of-single-pieces-of-plastic/989580 "2023-09-04T12:21:57Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![longtry](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/839c29/32.png) [@longtry](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/longtry)\ **Post date:** [September 4, 2023, 12:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/economic-damage-of-single-pieces-of-plastic/989580/1 "2023-09-04T12:21:57Z")
Hi. I want to know the impact of individual plastic items on everything (us, animals, the Earth…) all converted into money. For example, this specific type of bottle generally brings about a damage of x dollars per piece, that one-use cutlery costs the environment y dollars… That would be easier to form a visceral image of our impact instead of the big numbers of total damage. ---
**Author:** ![Mangetout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mangetout/32/19_2.png) [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)\ **Post date:** [September 4, 2023, 1:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/economic-damage-of-single-pieces-of-plastic/989580/2 "2023-09-04T13:56:55Z")
Is it even possible to convert every environmental impact to a number of money? Let’s say there is some pollutant that in sufficient quantity causes the extinction of a species. How do you wish the extinction of a species to be priced, and how meaningful would that price be, given that handing it over in cash would not restore the species from extinction? I suppose you could probably calculate the price of never using anything that contains the pollutant, but that seems different to the question you asked. ---
**Author:** ![TriPolar](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tripolar/32/3008_2.png) [@TriPolar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TriPolar)\ **Post date:** [September 4, 2023, 3:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/economic-damage-of-single-pieces-of-plastic/989580/3 "2023-09-04T15:09:55Z")
What would you value the price of human existence at? Divide that by a number in the trillions to get the ‘plastic extinction deposit’ price to be added to plastic items. Better to find the cost that has to be added to plastics to make their usage impractical independently from calculating the price of avoiding extinction. ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [September 4, 2023, 5:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/economic-damage-of-single-pieces-of-plastic/989580/4 "2023-09-04T17:53:32Z")
Don’t forget to net out the price of using other materials instead of plastic. Glass has high costs in manufacturing and shipping. Metal does as well. Even paper requires huge numbers of trees. Putting them together may have higher environmental costs than using plastic. ---
**Author:** ![LSLGuy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lslguy/32/5813_2.png) [@LSLGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LSLGuy)\ **Post date:** [September 4, 2023, 6:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/economic-damage-of-single-pieces-of-plastic/989580/5 "2023-09-04T18:41:27Z")
Perhaps the larger problem is single-use whatevers. There is no ecologically sound way to produce, distribute, use, then throw away an e.g. fork. Whether e.g. plastic is better than paperboard is immaterial. A fork can last 10s of thousands of uses. Using it just once produces 10,000x the harm. The rest of the differences in type of fork are just noise: single-use is the signal. ---
**Author:** ![Ruken](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/f475e1/32.png) [@Ruken](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ruken)\ **Post date:** [September 4, 2023, 7:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/economic-damage-of-single-pieces-of-plastic/989580/6 "2023-09-04T19:43:49Z")
> [@Mangetout](#): > > Is it even possible to convert every environmental impact to a number of money? Lifecycle assessments typically break out separate categories\* without a standard way to compare them by monetary cost. E.g., GREET considers CO2e, VOC, CO, NOx, PM10,2.5, and SOx separately. It looks at water consumption but not eutrophication. ---
**Author:** ![Omar\_Little](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/omar_little/32/269_2.png) [@Omar\_Little](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Omar_Little)\ **Post date:** [September 5, 2023, 4:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/economic-damage-of-single-pieces-of-plastic/989580/7 "2023-09-05T16:59:48Z")
Humans are extremely damaging to our environment. Just our individiual presence and exponentially when we get into the billions of us. ---
**Author:** ![longtry](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/839c29/32.png) [@longtry](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/longtry)\ **Post date:** [September 6, 2023, 12:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/economic-damage-of-single-pieces-of-plastic/989580/8 "2023-09-06T00:56:58Z")
Perhaps another reason we can’t (easily) find monetary damage numbers for single-piece plastics is because if there were, governments would likely conform to increasing pressure from environmentalists and tax the products accordingly. And corporations surely hate that. ---
**Author:** ![Mangetout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mangetout/32/19_2.png) [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)\ **Post date:** [September 6, 2023, 8:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/economic-damage-of-single-pieces-of-plastic/989580/9 "2023-09-06T08:53:43Z")
I suspect it might go the other way. If the environmental cost of using a piece of plastic cutlery worked out to be, say, one ten-thousandth of a cent, people would just shrug it off (pretty much as they have been doing when they don’t know the cost). ---
**Author:** ![PatrickLondon](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/patricklondon/32/4422_2.png) [@PatrickLondon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PatrickLondon)\ **Post date:** [September 6, 2023, 11:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/economic-damage-of-single-pieces-of-plastic/989580/10 "2023-09-06T11:13:41Z")
Nor is it a matter of the individual plastic items as we use them - we simply don’t know what the long-term consequences will be of increasing microplastics in the oceans and as they are absorbed up the food chains - and ultimately into us. > **[Microplastics and the human health impact | Breast Cancer UK](https://www.breastcanceruk.org.uk/microplastics-and-the-human-health-impact/)** > > What is the impact of microplastics on human health? Read BCUK's news for tips and information on how to reduce your breast cancer risk. ---
**Author:** ![Jasmine](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jasmine/32/2964_2.png) [@Jasmine](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jasmine)\ **Post date:** [September 6, 2023, 11:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/economic-damage-of-single-pieces-of-plastic/989580/11 "2023-09-06T11:23:39Z")
> [@longtry](#): > > Hi. I want to know the impact of individual plastic items on everything (us, animals, the Earth…) all converted into money. The real cost is the cumulative effect of many plastic items. For example, were there only ONE empty plastic 2.5 gallon water container, it’s cost would be $0.00 because its effect would be virtually zero. The only way to even approximate what you want would be if you could find out how many individual plastic items are actually loose in our environment. I checked, and the number is so great that the number is measured in tonnage. ---
**Author:** ![longtry](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/839c29/32.png) [@longtry](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/longtry)\ **Post date:** [September 7, 2023, 5:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/economic-damage-of-single-pieces-of-plastic/989580/12 "2023-09-07T05:04:39Z")
Then it’s actually not very hard to calculate the single damage. We just need to sample a few dozen tons, and average the number-of-pieces counts in each ton. Set up some common-sense rules to count, such as if a bottle and its cap are separated, then 2 of them count as 1 item, etc. Then whatever the damage per ton is, we can simply divide it by number of piece per ton. Did you find the tonnage damage when you checked? ---
**Author:** ![Princhester](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/3e96dc/32.png) [@Princhester](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Princhester)\ **Post date:** [September 7, 2023, 7:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/economic-damage-of-single-pieces-of-plastic/989580/13 "2023-09-07T07:34:00Z")
As others have said, what you are asking is impossible since it involves putting monetary values on non-monetary things. Ignoring the cogent and frankly obviously correct reasons for this given by other posters, in favour of a conspiracy theory is not going to take you anywhere useful. ---
**Author:** ![Mangetout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mangetout/32/19_2.png) [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)\ **Post date:** [September 7, 2023, 10:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/economic-damage-of-single-pieces-of-plastic/989580/14 "2023-09-07T10:21:23Z")
Calculating the damage isn’t all that hard in theory, although I think that, since the range of possible outcomes of a discarded bottle cap include: 1. It falls into a crevice between two rocks and stays there doing literally nothing for a million years 2. It washes into the ocean and the same day, a rare turtle chokes to death on it, an ‘average damage’ which includes such disparate values is probably meaningless, because it provides no predictive power to the person intending to carefully or carelessly discard the next bottle top. But even if you could calculate some meaningful measure of damage, how are you proposing to price it? ---
**Author:** ![Jasmine](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jasmine/32/2964_2.png) [@Jasmine](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jasmine)\ **Post date:** [September 7, 2023, 11:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/economic-damage-of-single-pieces-of-plastic/989580/15 "2023-09-07T11:34:33Z")
> [@longtry](#): > > Then it’s actually not very hard to calculate the single damage. Okay, so what did you come up with for a number? The OP has me curious now. ---
**Author:** ![Ruken](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/f475e1/32.png) [@Ruken](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ruken)\ **Post date:** [September 7, 2023, 11:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/economic-damage-of-single-pieces-of-plastic/989580/16 "2023-09-07T11:53:19Z")
If not yet mentioned, “plastic” covers many different substances. Polyethylene is not PET is not PVC. And the form factor matters. A one ton cube is going to interact with the environment than one ton of plastic forks. ---
**Author:** ![PastTense](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pasttense/32/14550_2.png) [@PastTense](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PastTense)\ **Post date:** [September 7, 2023, 1:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/economic-damage-of-single-pieces-of-plastic/989580/17 "2023-09-07T13:54:20Z")
> [@Princhester](#): > > As others have said, what you are asking is impossible since it involves putting monetary values on non-monetary things. What is the value of a human life? On one hand you can say this is impossible since it is a non-monetary thing. On the other hand it is regularly done when considering measures to prevent traffic accidents/deaths. ---
**Author:** ![Princhester](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/3e96dc/32.png) [@Princhester](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Princhester)\ **Post date:** [September 7, 2023, 2:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/economic-damage-of-single-pieces-of-plastic/989580/18 "2023-09-07T14:23:51Z")
The value we put on human life is arbitrary, irrational, highly variable and circumstantial. It’s an illustration of how difficult it is to come up with monetary values for such things. That difficulty is multiplied thousand fold when it comes to working out the monetary damage of a multifaceted problem like plastic pollution. ---
**Author:** ![PastTense](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pasttense/32/14550_2.png) [@PastTense](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PastTense)\ **Post date:** [September 7, 2023, 6:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/economic-damage-of-single-pieces-of-plastic/989580/19 "2023-09-07T18:16:40Z")
> The goals of [Senate Bill 270, the so-called plastic bag ban](https://www.latimes.com/local/politics/la-me-pol-brown-bills-20141001-story.html), spoke to the “three Rs” of waste reduction: Reduce the number of plastic bags Californians use, reuse the ones they receive, and recycle them once their useful life has ceased (the bags, not the Californians). The thin plastic bags that used to line every bathroom trash can and litter box in California were and are made of low-density polyethylene, or LDPE. More than 30 billion of those single-use plastic carryout bags used to be distributed across California every year. California’s 2014 bag ban law focused on grocery stores, which can no longer give you one of those thin plastic bags. But they can sell you a heftier sack made of high-density polyethylene, or HDPE. > **[California's plastic bag ban is failing. Here's why](https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2023-08-24/whats-the-deal-with-single-use-plastic-bag-bans)** > > California's plastic bag ban aimed to reduce waste and increase recycling, but it hasn't worked out as planned. What went wrong? But the HDPE bags aren’t recycled either. So it’s just another environmental law which turned out to be greenwashing or a gimmick of some kind. ---
**Author:** ![LSLGuy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lslguy/32/5813_2.png) [@LSLGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LSLGuy)\ **Post date:** [September 7, 2023, 10:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/economic-damage-of-single-pieces-of-plastic/989580/20 "2023-09-07T22:35:30Z")
I just learned of this conference. It appears a lot of people are interested in plastic pollution management > **[Global Plastics Summit 2023](https://events.economist.com/global-plastics-summit/)** > > The inaugural Global Plastics Summit provides an independent, action driven platform for collaboration on the UN plastics treaty Which conference is a prelude to the actual UN meeting here: > **[Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee on Plastic Pollution](https://www.unep.org/inc-plastic-pollution)** > > UNEP is the global champion for the environment with programmes focusing on sustainable development, climate, biodiversity and more. It appears there’s some good info at this second cite for the interested reader. [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/economic-damage-of-single-pieces-of-plastic/989580.md?page=2)