The Basel Convention Plastic Waste Amendments, implemented in 2021, have the potential to reshape traditional ‘North-to-South' plastic waste trade patterns and their environmental impacts. We analyze plastic waste trade among 21 countries before (2019–2020) and after (2021–2022) the amendments, quantifying environmental impacts from transport and waste treatment using life cycle assessment. We find that post-amendment trade among selected EU and non-EU OECD countries increased to 71 %, up 12 percentage points from pre-amendment period, when half of the trade flowed to non-OECD Asian countries. This shift yielded modest increases of 2 % in climate and 5 % in energy benefits. Further expanding intra-EU-OECD trade could boost climate benefits by up to 12 %, mainly by reducing open burning in non-OECD Asian countries. These findings offer environmental insights into the EU's upcoming ban on plastic waste exports to non-OECD countries, suggesting future trade will likely concentrate among countries with aligned waste shipment rules.

The environmental impact of traded plastic waste hinges on how it is treated. Existing studies often use domestic or scenario-based recycling rates for imported plastic waste, which is problematic due to differences in recyclability and the fact that importers pay for it. We estimate the minimum required recycling rate (RRR) needed to break even financially by analysing import prices, recycling costs, and the value of recycled plastics across 22 leading importing countries and four plastic waste types during 2013–2022. Here we show that at least 63% of imported plastic waste must be recycled, surpassing the average domestic recycling rate of 23% by 40 percentage points. This discrepancy suggests that recycled plastics volumes from the global North-to-South trade may be underestimated. The country-specific RRR provided could enhance research and policy efforts to better quantify and mitigate the environmental impact of plastic waste trade.

The global trade of plastic waste has raised environmental concerns, especially regarding pollution in waste-importing countries. However, the overall environmental contribution remains unclear due to uncertain treatment shares between handling plastic waste abroad and domestically. Here, we conduct a life cycle assessment of global plastic waste trade in 2022 across 18 countries and six plastic waste types, alongside three “nontrade” counterfactual scenarios. By considering the required cycling rate, which balances importers’ costs and recycling revenues, we find that the trade resulted in lower environmental impacts than treating domestically with the average treatment mix. The trade scenario alone reduced climate change impact by 2.85 million tonnes of CO₂ equivalent and mitigated damages to ecosystem quality, human health, and resource availability by 12 species-years, 6200 disability-adjusted life years (DALYs), and 1.4 billion United States dollars (USD in 2013), respectively. These results underscore the significance of recognizing plastic waste trade as a pivotal factor in regulating global secondary plastic production when formulating a global plastics treaty.