Share of global plastic waste imports
What you should know about this indicator
- Data covers plastic waste classified under HS code 3915 ('waste, parings and scrap, of plastics') in UN Comtrade trade statistics. This includes waste from different polymer types such as polyethylene (PE), polystyrene (PS), and polyvinyl chloride (PVC).
- Data includes all transport methods: air, sea, road, rail, inland waterways, and cases where the transport mode was not specified.
- Calculated by dividing a country's imports by the sum of all countries' reported imports in that year.
- This data may not capture all plastic waste trade. Some plastic waste is traded under other codes (such as HS 3825 for refuse-derived fuels), and discrepancies can exist between what exporting and importing countries report.
What you should know about this indicator
- Data covers plastic waste classified under HS code 3915 ('waste, parings and scrap, of plastics') in UN Comtrade trade statistics. This includes waste from different polymer types such as polyethylene (PE), polystyrene (PS), and polyvinyl chloride (PVC).
- Data includes all transport methods: air, sea, road, rail, inland waterways, and cases where the transport mode was not specified.
- Calculated by dividing a country's imports by the sum of all countries' reported imports in that year.
- This data may not capture all plastic waste trade. Some plastic waste is traded under other codes (such as HS 3825 for refuse-derived fuels), and discrepancies can exist between what exporting and importing countries report.
Sources and processing
This data is based on the following sources
How we process data at Our World in Data
All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.
At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.
Notes on our processing step for this indicator
We calculated this by dividing each country's total imports by the global sum of imports for that year, then multiplying by 100 to express as a percentage.
Reuse this work
- All data produced by third-party providers and made available by Our World in Data are subject to the license terms from the original providers. Our work would not be possible without the data providers we rely on, so we ask you to always cite them appropriately (see below). This is crucial to allow data providers to continue doing their work, enhancing, maintaining and updating valuable data.
- All data, visualizations, and code produced by Our World in Data are completely open access under the Creative Commons BY license. You have the permission to use, distribute, and reproduce these in any medium, provided the source and authors are credited.
Citations
How to cite this page
To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:
“Data Page: Share of global plastic waste imports”, part of the following publication: Hannah Ritchie, Veronika Samborska, and Max Roser (2023) - “Plastic Pollution”. Data adapted from United Nations Comtrade Database. Retrieved from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260130-140016/grapher/share-plastic-waste-imports.html [online resource] (archived on January 30, 2026).How to cite this data
In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:
United Nations Comtrade Database (2025); United Nations Comtrade Database (2023) – with major processing by Our World in DataFull citation
United Nations Comtrade Database (2025); United Nations Comtrade Database (2023) – with major processing by Our World in Data. “Share of global plastic waste imports” [dataset]. United Nations Comtrade Database, “Comtrade Database” [original data]. Retrieved January 30, 2026 from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260130-140016/grapher/share-plastic-waste-imports.html (archived on January 30, 2026).