Toys top UNEP’s list for plastic per dollar

Most of the harm a toy does comes before it is unwrapped. In a study of 16 consumer goods sectors for the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), toy-makers used more plastic for every dollar they earned than any of the others, and most of the damage that plastic causes happens while it is being made³.

Most toys traded across borders come from China, and the biggest market for them is North America⁷¹. Few come back: even France, the one country we found that counts, collects only about one toy in nine by weight¹⁴.

A $123 billion toy market

The world spent about $123 billion on toys in 2025, 8% more than the year before, according to the market research firm Circana¹. Not all of it is for children, either: nearly a fifth of sales are toys for people aged 15 and older¹.

Nobody official counts toy sales worldwide, so the number rests on Circana’s sales panels, and Circana doesn’t publish its method. It also revises past years: last year’s edition put 2024 at $111.8 billion², while this year’s growth rate implies about $114 billion for the same year (our arithmetic). This page once showed $90.7 billion, an older estimate made on a different basis, so the jump from that figure to today’s is not growth.

How much plastic goes into toys? Nobody has weighed it

No agency weighs it, so the best measure is a 2014 UNEP estimate: about 40 tonnes of plastic for every $1 million toy-makers earn, the highest of the 16 sectors it studied³. The OECD’s global plastics data have no category for toys at all; they sit inside a broad “consumer and institutional products” group⁴.

Of UNEP’s 40 tonnes, 37.5 are in the toys themselves and 2.9 in their packaging. Counting the plastic used by suppliers further up the chain, it rises to 48 tonnes³. These are modelled figures for 2012, built from what companies spent on plastic, and they describe what the makers earned, not the price on the shop shelf.

Per child, the numbers are easier to picture. A peer-reviewed study of chemicals in plastic toys estimated that an American child gets about 33 kg of new toys a year⁵. US import records suggest a lower figure: about 1.05 million tonnes of toys came in during 2018⁶, for about 62 million children under 15⁸, or roughly 17 kg each (our arithmetic).

The study’s figure is probably too high, because it divides what shoppers spent by what toys cost per kilo at import, and shop prices are higher. Even the lower figure is a heavy suitcase of new toys for every child, every year.

How much of that is plastic is the part nobody has measured. The same study assumed 55% by weight, which gives 18.3 kg of plastic per child, but it took that share from a 2003 study of what young children put in their mouths⁵.

Nobody has checked that 90% of toys are plastic

You will often read that 90% of toys are made of plastic. It appears in a 2024 study for the European Commission, which cites a 2021 article on Green Matters, an environmental news site⁹. Green Matters, in turn, credits The World Counts¹⁰. This page used to say it, and it gave no source.

The other routes go nowhere firmer. The same EU study also cites a 2021 journal paper, where the 90% sits in a sentence with no citation of its own¹¹. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s version links to a 2017 HuffPost article, which credits an unnamed plastics trade magazine¹². We found no one who had weighed it.

The figure may describe something real, such as how many toys contain some plastic. That is a different question from how much of a toy is plastic, and the only estimate of that, the 55% above, is borrowed. The EU study itself says why nobody can check:

Green Matters credited this site with the 40-tonne figure too. That one does come from UNEP, but the old page wrapped it in a claim UNEP never made, that toys are the most plastic-intensive industry in the world. UNEP compared toys with 15 other consumer goods sectors, not with every industry³.

Made in China, bought in North America

China shipped about two-thirds of all the toys exported worldwide in 2022, by value: $48 billion out of $70 billion, or 68.7%⁷. That was the latest year almost every country reported. It counts exports rather than production, but no other country comes close: Czechia, next on the list, exported $3.2 billion.

The buying is just as concentrated. North America accounts for 41% of global toy sales¹ but only about 3% of the world’s children⁸. Divide sales by children and that’s roughly $780 a child in North America against about $37 everywhere else (our arithmetic, and a rough one, since part of the spending is on toys for teenagers and adults). Conditions in the factories that make toys are covered on our page about sweatshop workers.

Most of a toy’s plastic damage happens before the shop

UNEP’s study also put a price on the environmental damage caused by the toy sector’s plastic: more than $3.3 billion a year³. That’s 3.9% of the sector’s revenue, the highest share of any sector it looked at.

Packaging is a small part of it. The plastic in the toys themselves accounts for 93% of the damage, and 78% of that comes upstream, from producing the plastic before it ever reaches a toy factory. The largest single part is greenhouse gas emissions, at $1.3 billion³.

A life cycle study of children’s toys by DePaul University researchers, which adds up a product’s impact from raw material to bin, points the same way. Plastic toys, LEGO in particular, had a higher environmental impact than wooden toys and even some toys with batteries, and the material, the weight of the toy and how long it was played with all contributed²¹.

What happens to old plastic toys

We found only one country that counts what happens to old toys. Since April 2022 toy makers in France must fund a scheme to collect them, and in 2025 it gathered 17,000 tonnes against 154,000 tonnes of toys put on sale, about one in nine by weight¹⁴. Only 2,400 tonnes went on to be reused, about one in 64 by weight.

That is real progress: nearly four times as much as in 2023, when the scheme collected about 4,500 tonnes and saw 700 tonnes reused¹⁵. But it is far short of the scheme’s own targets, which call for 45% of toys to be collected by 2027¹⁴.

Recycling what is collected is harder still. Toys are often mixtures of different plastics, rubber and silicone, and recycling them risks carrying old, banned chemicals into new products⁹. In 2024 the scheme’s operator told toy makers that the collection network did not yet meet the legal conditions, so it was too early to call any toy recyclable¹⁶.

Are plastic toys toxic?

Some can be. A 2021 study of chemicals in plastic toys found 126 chemicals of concern in the materials, with the highest risks in the plasticisers that make plastic soft⁵.

Toys of all kinds made up 16% of the 4,671 alerts about dangerous products raised through the EU’s Safety Gate system in 2025, second only to cosmetics. Those toy alerts cover every kind of hazard; across all products, dangerous chemicals were the most common reason for an alert¹⁷.

The EU is moving against some of these chemicals. From 1 August 2030, its new toy safety law bans PFAS (“forever chemicals”) from being used in toys, along with listed bisphenols and chemicals known, presumed or suspected to disrupt human hormones¹⁸. For PVC and the additives that go into it, see is PVC toxic?.

What LEGO’s 52% renewable plastic means

LEGO’s figures show how much depends on the accounting. It says 52% of the material it bought in 2025 came from renewable sources¹⁹. Most of that is mass balance: its suppliers mix certified plant-based or recycled feedstock with fossil feedstock in a shared system, and the green share is credited to LEGO on paper. The material that is physically renewable or recycled, sugarcane plastic and recycled plastic kept separate, was 4% of everything it used¹⁹.

Even so, LEGO says it used less new fossil-based material to make its bricks in 2025 than in 2022, while its revenue grew 29%¹⁹. Its ambition for 2032 is for bricks made “from more materials that are renewable or recycled”, which commits to no particular share (our reading).

Switching material is not automatically better. In 2023 LEGO dropped plans for bricks made from recycled drinks bottles, because retooling its factories for that plastic instead of ABS, the hard plastic used in 80% of its bricks, would have produced more emissions²⁰. The DePaul study found that how long a toy is played with counts alongside what it is made of and how much it weighs²¹, which suggests a toy kept in use longer is worth more than a greener material.

Where toys and their plastic could be heading

The toy market is still growing. If 2025’s 8% held, the world would spend nearer $133 billion on toys in 2026 (a rough extrapolation, not a forecast). If each dollar of toys still carries roughly the plastic it did in 2012, which nobody has checked, more spending means more plastic.

In Europe, the new toy law also replaces the declaration of conformity, the paper in which a maker states that a toy meets EU rules, with a digital product passport, a record that travels with the product¹⁸. But when the European Commission chose which products would first get ecodesign rules, which can set requirements on durability, repair and recycled content, the study behind its choice ranked toys ninth⁹, and toys did not make the list for 2025 to 2030¹³.

France’s collection would have to rise roughly fourfold to reach its 2027 target (our rough arithmetic, since the target is measured against the previous year’s sales).

We found no update of UNEP’s 2012 estimate, and nobody counts the plastic in the world’s toys. If digital passports end up recording what toys are made of (our speculation, not something the law requires), someone could finally count it.