Plastic Waste Calculator

Calculate your plastic footprint from bottles or weight. See it stack up to giants or estimate its potential impact on marine animal lives.

Example: Plastic Waste

For example, consuming 1 pounds of plastic of plastic waste per day could be equivalent to approximately 780.61 chewbacca (height) over 1 year. Enable JavaScript to calculate with your own values and explore more comparisons!

Size My Plastic Waste

Size my:

(Global Avg: 0.37 lbs per day)

My Pounds of Plastic per day

Compare to / Assess

Your Habit Scale

See how your consumption adds up over time.

Time Period	Equivalent in Chewbacca (height)
1 Year	288.82 Wookies
5 Years	1,444.12 Wookies
25 Years	7,220.61 Wookies

How It's Calculated

1. Your input: 0.37 Pounds of Plastic per day.
2. Each g plastic is considered to have a height of 1.1 cm (≈ 0.4 inches).
3. This results in a total stacked height of 1.8 meters (≈ 5.9 feet) per day.
4. One chewbacca (height) is 2.28 meters (≈ 7.5 feet) tall/long.
5. The final result is found by dividing your total stacked height by the height of one chewbacca (height).

Why It's Important

Prepare for a trash titan! If your annual plastic waste was compressed and stacked, it would be as tall as 288.82 Chewbacca (height)(s). Imagine a monument of discarded items so high it could stare down a dinosaur or challenge a national landmark. That’s a staggering amount of personal pollution!

This massive scale is critically important because it visualizes your individual contribution to a global crisis. Each item adds to the environmental impact of plastic pollution, which affects wildlife, ecosystems, and even human health. Seeing your waste reach such heights underscores the power and urgency of reducing single-use plastics and adopting more sustainable consumption habits.

Do you need help with your habit? See our list of international helplines and resources.

The Science Behind It

Plastic pollution has emerged as a critical environmental challenge, with more than 8 million tonnes entering oceans annually. SizeMyHabit’s Plastic Waste Calculator contextualizes personal plastic use—translating bottles and bags into ecological impacts backed by life-cycle assessments.

1. Life-Cycle Assessment (LCA)

LCAs quantify environmental impacts from raw-material extraction to disposal. PET plastic production consumes roughly 2 MJ per 1 kg of material and generates 0.23 kg CO₂-equivalent emissions. By converting user inputs (e.g., 10 plastic bottles) into LCA metrics, our tool visualizes hidden carbon footprints.

2. Marine Pollution Pathways

Once in the environment, plastics fragment into microplastics (<5 mm), which are ingested by marine organisms, entering food webs and posing health risks to wildlife and humans. Our “bottle count” feature projects potential microplastic release based on average degradation rates over decades.

3. Ingestion & Toxicity

Microplastics can adsorb persistent organic pollutants (POPs) like PCBs and PBDEs. Laboratory studies show that fish exposed to plastic-bound POPs accumulate higher toxin levels, leading to endocrine disruption and reduced reproductive success. The calculator’s “sea-life deaths” metric draws on ecological risk models to illustrate these cascading effects.

4. Waste Management & Circularity

Globally, only about 9% of plastic waste is recycled. Advances in chemical recycling—polymers depolymerized back into monomers—promise higher recovery rates but remain costly and energy-intensive. SizeMyHabit incorporates current average recycling rates to estimate how much of a user’s plastic actually enters landfill or incineration.

5. Behavioral Interventions

Studies show that personal carbon footprint calculators can reduce plastic waste behaviors by 20–30% when coupled with actionable tips. By offering alternatives—reusable bottles, bulk purchases—the tool nudges users toward circular-economy practices.