2021 Packaging Industry Economic Impacts Study
As the recent pandemic has demonstrated, packaging is an essential service that plays a key role in ensuring the health and safety of people and products as those products are manufactured and shipped and stored and consumed. The U.S. packaging industry, as it manufactures and distributes those products, also strives to play a key role in environmental protection, resource conservation and sustainability. However, an underlying value of packaging that is rarely explored is its economic impact on the U.S. domestic economy. This report explores the U.S. packaging industry’s role in the economy, including ways the industry contributes to the post-pandemic recovery.
AMERIPEN – the American Institute for Packaging and the Environment – retained the independent economic consulting firm of John Dunham & Associates to analyze and help us better understand the size and scope of the packaging industry in the U.S. and document its significant contribution to the U.S. economy in 2021 in terms of direct, indirect, and induced employment, tax generation and overall economic benefit and output at the national and state levels.
The packaging industry is a dynamic part of the U.S. economy, accounting for about $537.91 billion in total economic output, equivalent to roughly 2.50 percent of GDP. Packaging product manufacturers touch firms in all 544 sectors of the US economy through their production and distribution linkages and the industry directly or indirectly supports 1,689,811 American jobs in 2021. These workers earn over $117.73 billion in wages and benefits, and members of the industry and their employees pay $43.46 billion in direct federal, state and local taxes, not including state and local sales taxes imposed on packaging products.
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