Fig. 3: The difference between required recycling rates and national plastic recycling rates across 22 countries.
From: Economic viability requires higher recycling rates for imported plastic waste than expected
a Illustrates the variations in average RRR across countries and plastic types. The dashed line represents the average RRR across countries, weighted by the total import mass across countries. The plastic waste type label on the Y axis displays the average RRR of each plastic waste type, weighted by the import mass of each plastic waste type across countries. In addition, the dotted line below denotes the country’s average plastic recycling rate, weighted by the annual domestically generated plastic waste across countries. Mass data corresponding to (a) are provided in Supplementary Table 3. A comparison of the average RRR, weighted by either trade mass or trade value and using both trade and mirror trade data, is shown in Supplementary Table 5. b Illustrates how discrepancies between these two recycling rates affect the estimates of recycled plastics from the waste traded from the Global North to the Global South between 2013 and 2022 (countries involved are listed in Supplementary Table 4). The trade data originate from the UN Comtrade database. The results from (a, b) calculated using mirror trade data are shown in Supplementary Fig. 6.
