The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) assembled national data on plastic production, use, waste and disposal for every world region, creating the reference dataset that most later models and news reports rely on.
In 2019 the world used about 460 million tonnes of plastic and generated roughly 350 million tonnes of plastic waste. Only 9% of that waste was recycled; about one-quarter was mismanaged, meaning dumped, openly burned or leaked into the environment.
The report also estimated that 22 million tonnes of plastic leaked into the environment in 2019, of which 6.1 million tonnes reached rivers, lakes and seas and 1.7 million tonnes reached the ocean, and that the plastics lifecycle produced 1.8 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases, measured as the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) that would have the same warming effect, about 3.4% of global emissions.
The OECD's ocean-leakage figure is much lower than other estimates because it uses a narrower scope.