They come right out and say it just like it's regular English! :) From vox.com
2. Plastic produces external costs that are almost equal to its total market value
The plastics industry imposes all kinds of costs on society that it doesn’t have to pay (“externalities”): It emits carbon dioxide, it generates air pollution, it must be collected and sorted, and a great deal of it ends up in the ocean.
Adding up all those costs, drawing on the latest research, the report comes up with with a total externalities cost of between $800 and $1,400 per tonne, with “at least $1,000” used as a reasonable rule of thumb.
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All told, then, a tonne of plastic imposes about $1,000 in unpaid external costs, which is about $1 per kilogram, or $350 billion a year. “The average cost of a tonne of plastic is $1,000 - $1,500,” the report says, “so the subsidy from the rest of society to the plastics industry is only a little less than the total sales value of the industry.”
Those “unpaid” external costs are being paid today, of course — they don’t vanish. It’s just that they are overwhelmingly being paid by poor people and people living in poor countries, the ones living next to toxic incinerators, gathering plastic waste, and living with the most concentrated air and water pollution.
