Few people consider used plastic to be a valuable global commodity. Yet China has imported 106 million tonnes of old bags, bottles, wrappers and containers worth $57.6 billion since 1992, the first year it disclosed data. *So when the country announced last year that it finally had enough of everybody else's junk, governments the world over knew they had a problem*. They just didn’t know exactly how large it was.
Now they know. By 2030, an estimated *111 million metric tonnes of used plastic will need to be buried or recycled somewhere else—or not manufactured at all*. That's the conclusion of a new analysis of UN global trade data by University of Georgia researchers. Other nations, such as India, Vietnam and Malaysia, have taken in more plastic, although with an appetite smaller than China’s. Vietnam recently suspended imports as ships clogged its ports.
Everyone's bottles, bags and food packages add up. Factories have churned out a cumulative 8.3 billion metric tonnes of new plastic as of 2017, the same Georgia team reported last year. Even 1 million metric tonnes, the scale that this material trafficks in every year, is hard to visualize in the abstract. It's 621,000 Tesla Model 3s. It's 39 million bushels of corn kernels. The world’s 700 million iPhones make up roughly a tenth of a million metric tonnes.
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