Plastic film residue concentrations in Chinese croplands

Agricultural plastic mulch films are a major source of plastic pollution of croplands. In China, which uses about 68% of the plastic mulch film produced globally (ca. 1.4 million tonnes y-1), soils have been heavily contaminated with mulch fragments. Here, we collected a national dataset of macroplastic residues (> 5 mm) in soil, including 3145 sampling sites, and provincial plastic film usage from 1992 to 2019 in China, and we established a linear model between the residue amount and historical cumulative usage within each province. We quantified the amount of plastic mulch residues in Chinese croplands on a national scale during the past 30 years and predicted plastic pollution until 2050. Our results reveal the total national amount of plastic mulch residue in 2020 to be 2.07 million tonnes with a 95% CI of [1.67, 2.58]. This accumulated amount of plastic in Chinese soils roughly equals the annual amount of plastic films used globally (2.08 million tonnes in 2018), which is about ..., , # Plastic film residue concentrations in Chinese croplands

Dataset DOI: [10.5061/dryad.5hqbzkhhp](10.5061/dryad.5hqbzkhhp)

## Description of the data and file structure

This dataset includes 3,145 records of residual plastic mulch film concentrations (kg/ha) for 32 provincial-level administrative regions in China, excluding Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, and Tibet.

### Files and variables

#### File: Data\_S2.zip

**Description:** The dataset includes the residual concentration of plastic film, sampling coordinates, sampling year, and data source.

In the Excel, the first column represents the ID number, the second column indicates the province name, the third column shows the longitude of the sampling site, the fourth column shows the latitude of the sampling site, the fifth column indicates the concentration of residual plastic film (kg/ha), the sixth column shows the Sampling Year, and the seventh column indicates the data source.

In this dataset, the concentration of some plastic mu...,