Journal of the Endocrine Society – Feb 2024
The disease burden directly attributable to plastic production and consumption is substantial, and runs across the entire lifespan. This article identify billions of dollars in annual costs directly attributable to plastic uses, driven largely by PBDEs.
In March 2022, the United Nations Environment Assembly announced plans for a global plastics treaty. Early negotiations over the subsequent year focused on the effects of plastics on oceans and wildlife, with human health barely mentioned [1]. More recently, governments are increasingly incorporating the effects of chemicals used in plastic materials as considerations. These include bisphenols used in polycarbonate plastics, polybrominated diphenylethers (PBDEs) used as flame retardant additives, phthalates used in polyvinyl chloride (PVC) plastics and perfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) used as additives to polyethylene plastics or used as monomers in fluoroplastic polymers [2].
Resisting the focus on chemicals are those countries with economies substantially driven by fossil fuels [3]. Their governments are concerned about the costs of policy options that reduce plastic production, because many plastics are derived from these materials [4]. The United States, for example, produced 18% of all plastic produced globally in 2019, with a market share of $97.5 billion [5].
The social costs of disease and disability in the United States due to PBDEs, phthalates, and bisphenols [6, 7], as well as PFAS [8], are very large, on the order of $400 billion annually. A more recent study by the Minderoo-Monaco Commission suggests even higher costs, more than $900 billion per year [9]. But the commission mistakenly assumes that PBDEs, phthalates, and bisphenols are used only in plastic materials, when these chemicals are also used in nonplastic applications, including solvents and ceramics [10]. It also propagated a mathematical error in the population affected by phthalate exposure, overestimating attributable mortality by a factor of two [7].
To accurately inform the tradeoffs involved in the ongoing reliance on plastic production as a source of economic productivity in the United States, we calculated the attributable disease burden and cost due to chemicals used in plastic materials in 2018.