Global trade in plastic waste and scrap down by half since 2014, says OECD report

According to the recently published annual update from the OECD entitled Monitoring trade in plastic waste and scrap 2025, the global trade in plastic waste and scrap continued in 2022-2033 to follow the downward trend seen over the past decade.

The 50% fall seen from 2014 to 2023 was primarily driven by a sudden drop in trade in 2018, the direct consequence of due to the People’s Republic of China’s adoption of a unilateral import control.

To regulate the trade in plastic waste and scrap, governments adopted amendments to the Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and their Disposal. These changes were also partly included in the OECD Decision of the Council on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Wastes Destined for Recovery Operations, effective from January 1, 2021, aimed at reducing problematic or difficult-to-process plastic waste and scrap volumes.

This present report is the fifth in a series of annual OECD monitoring papers evaluating the impact of international trade controls on plastic waste and scrap. Prior reports tracked trade flow trends up to 2022, and found that

Global trade in plastic waste and scrap decreased by 8% from 2020 to 2022, prior to the enforcement of these controls.

The trend toward more balanced trade between OECD countries in terms of exports and imports continued from 2020 to 2022.

The share of exports to non-OECD countries fell from 35% in 2020 to 27% in 2022, though non-OECD countries in South and Southeast Asia received significant volumes.

This latest publication showed that global trade in plastic waste and scrap continued to decline from 2022 to 2023, with intra-regional trade gaining importance, particularly amongst European OECD Member Countries, which accounted for almost half of the global trade.

A comparison of plastic waste and scrap trade trends with those of paper waste, which underwent no additional controls, indicates that newly introduced measures have effectively reduced the volume of traded plastic waste. The comparison shows that by 2023, the trade in plastic waste and scrap was 0.72 Mt lower (or 15%) than if it had followed the trend in unsorted paper waste starting from 2020. This suggests that multilateral trade controls may have helped to reduce the global volume of trade in plastic waste.

Exports from OECD to non-OECD countries remain, raising concerns that high-income OECD countries may export low-value, difficult-to-recycle plastic waste to low- and middle-income countries. As these countries are less likely to manage plastic waste and scrap in an environmentally sound manner, there is a risk that it could contribute to plastic pollution in these countries either directly, by generating unrecyclable residues during recycling processes, or indirectly by displacing domestically generated waste from available recycling capacities.

In 2023, five of the top 20 export destinations were non-OECD, with Malaysia as the largest; volumes to Viet Nam and Indonesia also grew from 2022 to 2023. Exports to non-OECD countries rose 15% (0.22 Mt) from 2022 to 2023, while intra-OECD trade decreased by 2% (0.12 Mt). Trade within OECD countries tends to have a higher value per weight than exports to non-OECD countries, indicating a potentially lower quality in exports to non-OECD destinations.

Twenty-two OECD countries reported a decrease in total exports from 2022 to 2023. The most significant drops in absolute terms were noted in Germany, Slovenia, Belgium, and Poland.

Exports from OECD Member Countries to non-OECD countries increased by 15%, amounting to 0.22 Mt, from 2022 to 2023. In 2023, the top five OECD exporters to non-OECD nations were Japan, the Netherlands, Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States.