2022-09-10 · 353 million tonnes of plastic waste, 2019
Recycling is the smallest thing that happens to plastic
Follow 1,000 tonnes of global plastic waste. Nine squares get recycled. Most of the rest is buried, burned, or dumped. The recycling bin is not the system.
Planetary boundaries love waffle charts — one cell is a fixed sip of the whole resource. This grid divides plastic waste (2019) (2022 snapshot) into colored bands — Sanitary landfill, Dumped, burned, leaked, and 2 more groups — using equal squares so you compare shares, not country size on a map.
1 cell = 353 thousand tonnes of plastic waste (0.1% of plastic waste (2019)) · 1,000 cells
Context
The 2022 figures from OECD Global Plastics Outlook put Sanitary landfill at 50% of plastic waste (2019) and Dumped, burned, leaked at 22% — about 353 million tonnes of plastic waste in this edition's rounding.
OECD Global Plastics Outlook (2019 data, published 2022): 9% recycled, 19% incinerated, ~50% landfilled, 22% mismanaged (dumps, open burning, leakage).
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Credit this grid as Inagrid — https://inagrid.com/e/2022-09-10-plastic-afterlife