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by tomatotomato37 2790 days ago
Fun statistics & math:

  2010 total plastic marine debris[0]: 4,800k - 12,700k metric tons
  2010 EU plastic marine debris[0]: 50k-120k metric tons (Higher than the US by ~1k)
  2010 EU plastic marine debris percentage[0]: 1%
  2016 EU export of nontoxic garbage to a country in top 10 plastic marine waste[2]: 269,000 tonnes (a lot missing statistics so wide error bars here)
  2015 percent of nontoxic garbage export that is plastic/mixed[1]: ~9%
  Hours wasted digging through overly verbose pdfs and mislabled charts: Too many

  Probable amount of EU plastic that gets exported to top 10 country: 26.9k - 53.8k tonnes
  Crude adjusted EU ranking if 100% of the doubled amount makes it into the ocean: ~10th 
  Incredibly crude adjusted EU plastic marine debris percentage: 2%
Other stupid things learned: Netherlands imports hilarious amounts of garbage [3]

[0]: https://www.iswa.org/fileadmin/user_upload/Calendar_2011_03_... (the footnote of table 1 specifically)

[1]: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

[2]: http://appsso.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/nui/show.do (You'll have to screw with the customizations to get useful statistics)

[3]: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/waste/transboundary-waste-...