Paper or Plastic — Abstract

• Packaging comprises one-third of the gross weight and one-half of the total volume of America's municipal solid waste.
• Americans account for an average of 800 pounds of packaging per year.
• 320 million hot and cold take-out cups are purchased every day in the United States.
• Each year more than 150 billion single-use beverage containers are sold in the United States.
• One out of every three servings of water consumed in the United States now comes in a plastic bottle, for a total of 45 million per day, of which just 10 percent are recycled.
• According to a CNN poll in 2001, of the 80 percent of people who buy Christmas gift for their pets, 67 percent wrap them.
• Today the total volume of plastics produced worldwide has surpassed that of steel and continues to increase.
• About 30 percent of plastics produced each year, over 20 million tons, is used for packaging (its largest use by far).

Boys collecting floating waste, Manila Bay, Republic of the Philippines
© Harmut Scwarzbach/UNEP/Peter Arnold, Inc.
The Industrially Packaged World
Over 60 percent of industrial packaging is now used for food and beverages. While Japan, North America, and Europe have for a long time accounted for most of the world's packaging consumption, that trend is now rapidly transforming food and waste production systems in many industrializing countries, particularly throughout Southeast and South Asia.

• In Western Europe, 42 percent of all plastics are used for packaging.
• Food and beverage packaging accounts for approximately 70 percent of the more than $100 billion packaging market in the United States and more than half of the $500 billion worldwide market.
• More than 500 million virgin wood pallets are produced in the United States every year, many of which are used just once and then disposed of.
• Over 100 billion pounds of synthetic adhesives are used in the United States each year for packaging.
• A billion pounds of plastic is used in trash bags each year in the United States, which in a sense, is packaging for garbage.
• Beach litter is between 40 and 60 percent plastic.
• Polyethylene accounts for 40 percent of all plastics produced worldwide — 80 billion pounds a year which corresponds to a global consumption rate of 16 pounds per person.
• 4 billion pounds of PET plastics are manufactured annually in the United States with over half being used to make bottles.
• There are over 4,000 different types of plastic additives. The global plastic additives business amounts to about $16 billion per year.

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