The production, consumption, and waste of plastics have been rapidly growing worldwide in the last decades. A variety of data are needed to characterize plastics stocks and flows across space, time, and life cycle to derive insights for developing strategies to address various sustainability challenges from plastics and plastics waste. Here we review data sources on plastics stocks and flows to identify data gaps and research needs. We categorize the reviewed data sources by life cycle stages of plastics including material production, semi-manufacturing, manufacturing, additives, consumption, in-use stock, end-of-life, waste treatment, and trade. We identify four data gaps in these existing data for characterizing plastics stocks and flows, including inconsistent classification, missing data, conflicting data, and inexplicit data for plastics products and waste. These data gaps represent critical research needs including common platform for data sharing, standard methods for data reconciliation and estimation, consistent data collection and reporting, and new approaches for data collection and curation. This review establishes the state-of-the-art of plastics stock and flow data and develops a roadmap for a high-quality, comprehensive characterization of plastics stocks and flows to develop management strategies to address the sustainability challenges of plastics production, consumption, waste, and pollution.

中文翻译：

---

对全球塑料库存和流量数据的严格审查

在过去的几十年里，塑料的生产、消费和浪费在全球范围内迅速增长。需要各种数据来表征塑料库存和跨空间、时间和生命周期的流动，以获得制定战略的见解，以应对塑料和塑料废物的各种可持续性挑战。在这里，我们回顾了塑料库存和流量的数据来源，以确定数据差距和研究需求。我们按塑料的生命周期阶段对审查的数据源进行分类，包括材料生产、半制造、制造、添加剂、消费、在用库存、报废、废物处理和贸易。我们在这些现有数据中确定了四个用于表征塑料库存和流量的数据差距，包括分类不一致、数据缺失、数据冲突、以及塑料产品和废物的不明确数据。这些数据缺口代表了关键的研究需求，包括数据共享的通用平台、数据协调和估计的标准方法、一致的数据收集和报告，以及数据收集和管理的新方法。该审查建立了最先进的塑料库存和流量数据，并为塑料库存和流量的高质量、全面表征制定了路线图，以制定管理战略，以应对塑料生产、消费、废物的可持续性挑战，和污染。以及数据收集和管理的新方法。该审查建立了最先进的塑料库存和流量数据，并为塑料库存和流量的高质量、全面表征制定了路线图，以制定管理战略，以应对塑料生产、消费、废物的可持续性挑战，和污染。以及数据收集和管理的新方法。该审查建立了最先进的塑料库存和流量数据，并为塑料库存和流量的高质量、全面表征制定了路线图，以制定管理战略，以应对塑料生产、消费、废物的可持续性挑战，和污染。