Plastic is cheap. At least in terms of price. We can get cups, plates, cutlery, bags, lighters, toys, boxes and everything else you can imagine for less than a dollar. You don't even need to buy it in bulk or order it through a bargain app like Wish, just go to the supermarket and check it out.
On reflection, however, it seems strange that this should be the case. In other words, plastic is a petroleum derivative, which has to be extracted from the depths of the earth with specialised machines, solidified and granulated before it is taken to a factory, where it undergoes complex industrial processing. How is it, then, that it comes to cost so little?
Before going any further, we need to clarify some concepts: price, value and cost...
Although they have some similarity, they are not the same. Price is the quantity or amount allocated for the sale of a good, product or service. Value, on the other hand, refers to the real utility of that good. And finally, cost indicates all those factors that were required to manufacture and generate a good.
So why is a price more in line with the production costs of plastic not reflected?
To understand this, we must point out that (conventional) economics omits two major factors involved in the production of goods and services. On the one hand, it does not take into account some natural resources that are taken for granted (!) in order to manufacture a product, such as water, air and space. The other thing that is missing in traditional economic analyses is the by-products and waste of the good that is generated.
Let us look at two specific examples. Regarding the first omission (resources), extensive cattle ranching comes to mind: the environmental damage of deforesting a plot of forest to raise cattle, as has happened in the Amazon (among many other places, such as Guanacaste), is not taken into account.
The second major omission (waste) is that companies that sell bottled water are not concerned about the generation of plastic bottles, most of which end up in our rivers and oceans. In both cases, a purely mercantilist criterion prevails.
In other words, we do not see their true cost reflected.
We now know that plastic is actually not cheap at all. On the contrary, its cost is extremely high: It is estimated that between 4.8 and 12.7 million tonnes of plastic end up in our oceans every year and, as of today, some estimate that there are 500 million tonnes polluting our seas. This is a real environmental and public health problem, affecting both marine life and human beings. Even in purely monetary terms: in Europe alone, plastic pollution costs between €259 million and €695 million to the tourism and fisheries sector combined(European Parliament, 2018).
Now we know that plastic is like many other products: we don't pay with money. Just as fast fashionshops offer usclothes with incredible discounts every season, at the cost of labour in quasi-slavery conditions of people on the other side of the world (mostly women and minors), the cost of the "convenience" of disposable and single-use plastic products is borne by the environment and people's health.
A question of justice.
Of course, we should call for a change in the way we value economic activities. Certainly, companies should take responsibility for the waste they generate, as at present they only receive the economic benefits of doing business.
A limit should also be placed on the extraction of resources for the production of goods and services. For example, the expansion of monocultures benefits a handful of executives, while exploiting vulnerable people for labour, depleting soils, polluting waters and destroying biodiversity.
To do so, we need to change the traditional economic conception for an Ecological Economy, which understands that all productive human activities are contained in the biosphere, and have direct consequences on the environmental balance, flora and fauna, and even on our possibilities of subsisting as a species.
This task falls to both the public and private sectors. But we cannot wait for this to happen. In fact, many of today's leaders in many parts of the world are unaware of the effects of climate change and deny the available science. We must therefore consider these factors when electing our representatives and supporting public policies.
In the meantime...
We cannot wait for change to come from above. Social action is vital, but personal choices carry far more weight than we might think. We now know that plastic is far from "cheap".
As consumers we have great power. If we inform ourselves about the real origin and cost of the products we buy, we can choose those that have the greatest value for us and are also environmentally sustainable. We can also think twice before choosing a disposable product, which we will use for a few moments and then roam the earth for hundreds of years.
Basically, it is a matter of understanding what Susan Freinkel so pointedly and aptly puts it: "we take natural substances created over millions of years, turn them into products designed for a few minutes' use, and then return them to the planet in the form of waste designed never to disappear". (Freinkel S., 2012)
So, from now on we can look at our consumption choices beyond our comfort and convenience, and make conscious decisions about what we put in our shopping cart. We now know that plastic is not only not cheap, but that we pay the ultimate price for it: our planet.
