Infographic 1
Flow of plastic through the Canadian economy

Infographic description

The title of the infographic is "Flow of plastic through the Canadian economy"

The infographic depicts the progression of plastic through production, use, diversion, recycling and disposal.

The flow starts in the upper left-hand corner, where there is a green box labelled "Manufacturers." From this box, a grey arrow labelled "Produced plastic" points down to another green box labelled "End users." One end of a double-ended yellow arrow labelled "Net trade in produced plastic" points toward the middle of the "Produced plastic" arrow.

To the right of the "End users" box, there is a semi-circular arrow labelled "Net change in plastic stock" flowing out of and back into the "End users" box. There is also a grey arrow pointing down from the "End users" box to a grey box labelled "Total discarded plastic."

There is an arrow labelled "Leaked plastic," pointing down and to the left from the left side of the "Total discarded plastic" box. There is also a grey arrow pointing down from the "Total discarded plastic" box to another grey box labelled "Collected plastic waste."

To the right of the "Collected plastic waste" box, there is a blue arrow labelled "Diverted plastic" that points to a green box labelled "Primary processors." There is another blue arrow to the right of the "Primary processors" box labelled "Baled plastic" that points to a green box labelled "Recyclers." One end of a double-ended yellow arrow labelled "Net trade in baled plastic" points towards the middle of the "Baled plastic" arrow.

The "Recyclers" box is in roughly the middle on the right-hand side of the infographic, and there is a curved blue arrow labelled "Recycled plastic" coming out of the top of it that points up and back over to the "Manufacturers" box in the upper left-hand corner.

There are three grey arrows going from left to right and labelled, respectively, "Directly disposed plastic waste," "Primary processor residual" and "Final processor residual" that point downward from the "Collected plastic waste," "Primary processors" and "Recyclers" boxes, respectively, toward a grey box labelled "Total disposed plastic."

There are two grey arrows beside each other pointing down from the bottom of the "Total disposed plastic" box: the one on the left is labelled "Plastic landfilled or incinerated without energy recovery," and the one on the right is labelled "Plastic incinerated or gasified with energy recovery."

Lastly, one end of a double-ended yellow arrow labelled "Net trade in disposed plastic" points toward the space between the "Total disposed plastic" and the "Plastic landfilled or incinerated without energy recovery" boxes.