What’s Your Plastic Footprint?
Count what actually leaves your house in a normal week. Three rooms, a few sliders, and a real number in kilograms per year, plus where to cut it fastest.
Slide through a normal week.
Let’s break it down
Kitchen
Where kitchen plastic tends to pile up over a year.
- Refill one insulated bottle instead of buying cases
- Loose produce plus two cloth bags at checkout
- Beeswax wrap or glass jars over cling film and baggies
Bathroom
Where bathroom plastic tends to pile up over a year.
- Shampoo and conditioner bars, refillable pumps for lotion
- Concentrated cleaning tablets in one glass spray bottle
- Safety razor with steel blades, bamboo toothbrush, tablet toothpaste
On the go
Where on the go plastic tends to pile up over a year.
- Keep a cup, fork, and steel straw in your bag
- Order dine-in when you can, decline the cutlery pack
- Skip condiment packets and ask for the pump or bottle
How this is calculated
Each item has a typical single-use weight in grams. We multiply that by how often it leaves your home (weekly items times 52, monthly items times 12) to get grams per year, then total everything into kilograms. Weights are averages, so treat your number as a well-informed estimate, not a lab measurement. The 50 kg benchmark is the global average for all plastic waste per person, per year, including plastics you never handle yourself such as construction materials, car parts and textiles. This calculator counts only the 22 everyday single-use items above, so a typical household lands well under the benchmark. Treat it as a direction, not a grade.
Sources: The world generated about 353 million tonnes of plastic waste in 2019, the most recent year with global data, which works out to roughly 46 kg per person. We round the benchmark to 50 kg (OECD; Our World in Data). Item weights are typical single-use packaging averages.
