Eastern Europe’s trade in these polymers was characterized by sizable exports of HDPE and polypropylene homopolymer (PP) and the largest volume imports of any region with the exception of, for polyethylene, Asia-Pacific and Latin America.This series of blogs quantifies each region’s imports and exports in 2024 of the major commodity polymers – LDPE, linear/ethylene-alpha-olefin copolymers (LL/EAOC), HDPE, EVA, PP, propylene copolymers (PRC), polystyrene and PVC.

Eastern Europe exported roughly 70% of its total HDPE shipments and 60% of its polypropylene to Western Europe, with exports to Asia-Pacific accounting for roughly an additional 30% for both polymers.

Eastern Europe was the highest volume importing region across all the commodity polymers, even higher than Western Europe, with these exceptions: Asia-Pacific imported much more of each grade of polyethylene; Latin America imported slightly more HDPE.

Western Europe was the source for 50% – 70% of all of Eastern Europe commodity polymer imports with the exception of LL/EA, HDPE and PP., where Western Europe accounted for less than 40%. Middle East, North America and Asia-Pacific, in the aggregate, supplied the majority of Eastern Europe’s imports of LL/EAOC and HDPE; the Middle East, Africa and Asia-Pacific of PP.

From International Trader Publications’ continuously updated World Trade Analyses of all grades of commodity polymers.