The Green Dining Alliance and St. Louis Earth Day recently worked with students of St. Louis University’s MBA program on an Experimental Learning Project to determine the “Real Cost of Styrofoam.”
The GDA has long-suspected that the true cost of polystyrene (better known as Styrofoam) has a societal cost that is not reflected in its ultra-cheap sticker price.
Styrofoam is ridiculously cheap, much less expensive than alternative to-go cups and containers. Its commercial cost is due to its lightweight composition – Styrofoam is mostly made out tiny pellets of #6 plastic* and air, which makes it very light and easy to ship. The lightweight material also works great as an insulator, which is one of the reasons it has been adopted as a vessel for coffee and other hot liquids.
The findings of the research team are sobering. Styrofoam isn’t as cheap as it seems. In fact, the real cost of the convenience for these single-use items is staggering; when considering the cleanup costs, carbon emissions, environmental costs, and potential health effects, the hidden cost of Styrofoam comes out to $7 billion, annually.
Below are some of the results of their study:
25 billion Styrofoam coffee cups are used for just a few minutes and thrown away every year.
3 million tons of Styrofoam are produced in the USA annually, 80% of which is destined for the trash. The ubiquitous single-use plastic takes up 30% of landfill space- about 2.5 million tons or so of Styrofoam goes to the landfill every single year.
It takes over 500 years for Styrofoam to break down, which means that a cup you throw away today will still be around in the year 2516.
The environmental costs of Styrofoam are directly related to the same exact properties that make it so cheap to buy – it is nearly as light as air, which makes it very easy for the tiny pellets that compose its form to take to flight, ending up in our waterways, roads, and littering our streets.
20% of Styrofoam ends up in our waterways, where birds and fish mistake it for food. The pellets are awful for animals – Styrofoam pellets cannot be digested, clogging digestive systems, leading to starvation and death.
Streams and rivers eventually carry the plastic pieces to the ocean, where they wash up on coasts. The state of California estimates that the coastal cleanup of Styrofoam, plastic bags, and other single-use plastics costs them $72 million per year.
Styrofoam, despite the #6 plastic composition and the misleading recycling symbol it often carries, cannot be recycled easily or cost-effectively – less than 1% of Styrofoam is recycled in the USA. There are logistical difficulties of compacting and re-using what are essentially tiny pellets and air, and then there are the price barriers for trying to keep polystyrene out of the landfill – the re-sale value of Styrofoam has plummeted from 20 cents a pound to 6 cents a pound recently, making it financially irrational to recycle when it is much cheaper to make new polystyrene.
Styrofoam containers that contained food or beverages cannot be recycled at all due to contamination, even at places where packing Styrofoam is accepted for recycling.
Styrofoam is easily broken – its composite bits end up everywhere.
Styrofoam is made from benzene, styrene, and pentane; styrene was the chemical that SLU researchers focused on when considering the human health effects of Styrofoam for this paper. Residual amounts of styrene are present in the finished products of Styrofoam, which can leach into food and drinks.
Styrene has been classified by the National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences as “reasonably anticipated to be a human carcinogen.” This designation can be interpreted as, “could cause cancer, more research is needed.”
Styrene is likely to leach when it comes in contact with fatty foods, hot beverages, and especially alcohol. When thinking about the kinds of foods that typically end up in Styrofoam containers (fatty foods) and cups (hot coffee), it seems as though the exact kinds of items Styrofoam contains are exactly the kind of items it should never touch.
The takeaway? Refuse to use!
The mantra “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” is always in this order for a reason – the first step to lowering your environmental impact is to reduce the amount of waste you create. Recycling is great, (we love recycling more than words can say at St. Louis Earth Day), but it takes resources, including fossil fuels, to recycle. To make matters more complicated, there must be a market for the recyclable item for the system to be viable and self-sustaining.
Reducing your use can be easy:
- Keep an extra tupperware container in the car for leftovers.
- Only order what you plan on eating.
- Eat at Green Dining Alliance certified restaurants, where you can be sure you won’t get Styrofoam to-go containers.
- If you must get Styrofoam, tell the restaurant that you hope they can kick the habit of single-use Styrofoam, and tell them about the Green Dining Alliance. We’re here to help!
Special thanks to Manu Chandra, Colin Kohn, Jennifer Pawlitz, and Grant Powell for their hard work in crafting this paper, the cost model, and the info-graphic sheet!
If you would like to see the full report, please contact Jenn at jenn.derose@greendiningalliance.org
To help us reduce the use of Styrofoam in St. Louis, please consider donating to the Green Dining Alliance.
*While some recycling companies take #6 plastic in their single-stream bins, NO single stream recycling service takes Styrofoam – be sure to always bag it tightly (so the pellets don’t end up in our waterways) and put it in the trash.
