According to the federal government's own assessment, there's nine billion dollars' worth of plastic pollution, plastic littered or plastic in landfill every year, which means that it is plastic that we are creating, using once most of the time and then disposing of. There's a huge opportunity if we can do a better job of either reusing those plastic materials or actually effectively recycling them in a closed-loop system.
Then there are also the costs that are hard to articulate right now in terms of the financial costs to our health care system should these plastics prove to actually be harmful to our health—since we know we are ingesting them—as well as the impacts on our fisheries and our oceans as we continue to inundate these ecosystems with plastic trash.