3. United States
$6.3 billion
9.5% of Total Exports
America’s third-largest industry, the plastics manufacturing trade employs nearly one million people in the US. When you factor in plastics suppliers along with manufacturers, this number jolts to over 1.4 million plastics-related jobs overall. Many of these jobs can be attributed to the ubiquity of injection molding and plastic manufacturing facilities–of which there are nearly 16,000–that can be found throughout the US. With all of these factories, plastic production becomes a fairly straightforward process–a large reason for which nearly 108 billion pounds of plastics and resins were produced in 2013 alone in the US.
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