Plastic waste import volume worldwide by major country 2018

This statistic displays the volume of plastic waste imports worldwide in 2016 to 2018, broken down by select country. In China, plastic imports fell from 600,000 metric tons per month in 2016 to 30,000 metric tons in 2018. On December 31, 2017, China put a ban on a large portion of the plastic waste that foreign countries sent to the country for disposal.

Import volume of plastic waste worldwide from 2016 to 2018, by select country (in 1,000 metric tons per month)*

Characteristic	2016	2017	Early-2018	Mid-2018	Late-2018
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Release date

April 2019

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Region

Worldwide

Survey time period

January and November 2018

Supplementary notes

* Figures are based on world's top 21 exporting countries and regions.

Not all values for each country are available. Below we provide the more detailed timeline for the data, if available:
Malaysia: 20,000 tons per month - beginning of 2017; 35,000 tons per month - August 2018.
Taiwan: 10,000 tons per month - mid-2017.
Thailand: 75,000 tons per month - early 2018; below 10,000 tons per month - July 2018.
Vietnam: 100,000 tons per month - mid-2017; 7,500 tons per month - mid-2018.
Indonesia: 10,000 tons per month - late-2017.
South Korea: 5,000 tons per month - late-2017.
Turkey: 4,000 tons per month - early-2016.

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