2. Background

In 2022, the UN initiated negotiations for a global agreement to end plastic pollution. The mandate for the negotiations calls for addressing the full life cycle of plastic products. However, statistics and data on plastics production, composition and recyclability is currently fragmented or lacking altogether. To design policy tools and measure their effects it is crucial to have a better overview of how plastics flow through our economies – from primary production to waste management.

The Nordic Council of Ministers have initiated a collaborative vision project between the Nordic countries called “The Nordics as a driving force to reduce marine plastic pollution regionally and globally.” As part of this initiative, the Nordic Council of Ministers have funded this project, Better and harmonized statistics on plastic material flows. The goal for this project is to identify both the most important statistical information that plastic statistics should contain and the most critical knowledge gaps in current statistics in this field. Best practices for mapping plastic flows in the Nordics could be of great value in the continued UN negotiations.

As a central part of the project, technical experts from the statistics offices, customs offices and environmental agencies in the Nordic countries have worked together in a workshop held in Oslo in February 2024 to identify barriers in data collection and quality and potential solutions to rectify them. Specifically, we explored the following:

This report summarises the main challenges from preliminary material flow analyses of plastic, the statistical information that Nordic technical experts list as most important to include in national inventories and potential solutions to build down barriers against improved data collection and quality.