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.
More Data on Plastic Pollution
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.
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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/20260304-094028/grapher/share-plastic-waste-imports.html [online resource] (archived on March 4, 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 April 1, 2026 from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260304-094028/grapher/share-plastic-waste-imports.html (archived on March 4, 2026).Download
Quick download
Download the data shown in this chart as a ZIP file containing a CSV file, metadata in JSON format, and a README. The CSV file can be opened in Excel, Google Sheets, and other data analysis tools.
Data API
Use these URLs to programmatically access this chart's data and configure your requests with the options below. Our documentation provides more information on how to use the API, and you can find a few code examples below.
Data URL (CSV format)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-plastic-waste-imports.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=falseMetadata URL (JSON format)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-plastic-waste-imports.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=falseExcel / Google Sheets
=IMPORTDATA("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-plastic-waste-imports.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")Python with Pandas
import pandas as pd
import requests
# Fetch the data.
df = pd.read_csv("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-plastic-waste-imports.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", storage_options = {'User-Agent': 'Our World In Data data fetch/1.0'})
# Fetch the metadata
metadata = requests.get("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-plastic-waste-imports.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false").json()R
library(jsonlite)
# Fetch the data
df <- read.csv("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-plastic-waste-imports.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")
# Fetch the metadata
metadata <- fromJSON("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-plastic-waste-imports.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")Stata
import delimited "https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-plastic-waste-imports.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", encoding("utf-8") clear