Our World in Data's plastic pollution page brings together data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and from research papers by Geyer and others (all plastic ever made) and Meijer and others (plastic carried to the sea by rivers) into embeddable charts: production from 2 million tonnes in 1950 to 460 million in 2019, waste per person by country, what happens to plastic waste, and how much reaches the ocean. Everything is CC BY 4.0, downloadable as comma-separated values (CSV), and clearly written. Our calculator uses its per-capita series as a fallback.
Who made and funded this: Our World in Data, a project of the Global Change Data Lab (a UK charity) and the University of Oxford, funded by grants and donations. How to use it: the data source for our ages 12–14 and 15–18 lessons; students can build their own charts.