An Overview of Plastic Pollution Today

By Eli West

Plastic waste around the globe is an increasingly urgent environmental issue. Landfills, waterways, and even our food supplies have become polluted with plastics - both macro and micro. Communicating information about plastic waste can lead to behavioral changes at the individual level and policy changes at the governmental level.

This scatterplot measures plastic waste (in kg/person/day) on the x axis and GDP per capita (in USD/year) on the y axis for 15 selected countries. Each circle represents a country, and the size of the circle represents that country's annually generated plastic waste. The color of each circle represents the continent that country is in. Among these 15 countries are some of the world's biggest polluters, smallest polluters per capita, and wealthiest nations. Please note: these plastic waste data do not account for recycling, incineration, or other waste management processes after primary use.

This visualization reveals some surprising findings about specific countries’ plastic waste generation.

• India, in the lower left corner, has an exceptionally low per capita plastic waste measure, but is still a significant polluter given its large population (1.4 billion people as of 2021).
• China is the world's largest generator of plastics, but has relatively low per capita plastic waste and GDP per capita.
• The US has high plastic waste per capita, high GDP per capita, and high total plastic pollution.
• At the top right of the plot, Kuwait has the highest per capita measures of any country.
• There seems to be an overall correlation between plastic waste per capita and GDP per capita, but more data points are needed to strengthen this possible correlation. Denmark and Canada lie far outside this trend, with low per capita plastic waste given its high GDP per capita measure.

These data were found on the wesbite Our World in Data, but the original source is this paper published in the journal Science. The GDP per capita data were found on gapminder.org.