It was a challenging year for the world’s largest volume exporter of most grades of polyethylene and polypropylene. Weak demand in Asia-Pacific and competition from North America and Asia-Pacific resulted in a drop in Middle East exports of LPDE, EVA, polypropylene homopolymer, and propylene copolymers versus the prior year, and shifts in regional destinations.

This series of blogs quantifies imports and exports of the major commodity polymers – LDPE, linear/ethylene-alpha-olefin copolymers (LL/EAOC), HDPE, EVA, PP, propylene copolymers (PRC), polystyrene, and PVC, for the geographic regions of Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Africa, North America, Latin America, Middle East, and Asia-Pacific.