Honest projection · estimated
Plastic Produced Today (est.)
A projection of how much new plastic the world has made since midnight UTC, ticking at the most recent annual total spread evenly across the year. The world produces about 431 million tonnes a year — roughly 14 tonnes every second — almost all of it from oil and gas, and more than half of it in Asia. This counts plastic MADE, not plastic that reaches the ocean: production is a hard, well-measured figure, while ocean leakage is a much smaller and far less certain one (which is why it is the number we count). The refineries where the raw feedstock begins are one tap away in Grid.
About this number
This is an honest projection, not a census. It is computed by carrying a published figure forward at a known rate over real elapsed time — ≈ 13.65 tonnes/sec (made, not leaked), from PlasticsEurope — Plastics the Fast Facts 2025 (preliminary 2024 figures) — about 430.9 million tonnes of plastic produced worldwide in 2024, spread evenly across the year. The source is PlasticsEurope — Plastics the Fast Facts 2025. The true value is known only to within a margin; this is the running estimate, and we label it as one.