Problem sizing is a useful tool to communicate to the world how big a problem is that your organization is trying to address. Closely related to social return on investment analysis, problem sizing adds up all the negative impacts of a particular social problem providing a compelling, easy-to-understand statistic to encourage action.

As part of the social ROI analysis conducted for Classroom of Hope, Mettalytics conducted one of the first analyses to determine the cost of unrecycled plastic for the Indonesian island of Lombok.

Taking together impacts on human health, land values, tourism, and government clean-up costs the report estimated that unrecycled plastic causes damages between $190 to $360 per tonne!

Each year across the island, this equals a loss of $23 to $43 million dollars or 0.4% to 0.8% of Lombok’s GDP.

Read about the analysis we conducted for Classroom of Hope in the South China Morning Post.