Can Pakistan’s plastic waste really stack up to twice the height of the K2? That’s the claim made in “Rethinking Pakistan’s Relationship with Plastics1”report by the UNDP Innovation Accelerator Lab (2021). The report states that Pakistan generates 3.9 million tons of plastic waste annually, enough, it says, to form a pile 16,500 meters high, or twice the height of the K2, the second highest mountain on Earth.

As a researcher committed to scientific integrity, I decided to test this striking metaphor using basic volumetric analysis.

Let’s start with the numbers. The average density of mixed plastic waste is approximately 900 kilograms per cubic meter. Using the basic formula for volume (Volume = Mass ÷ Density), we can estimate the total space this waste would occupy. For example, 3.3 million tons of plastic waste, equivalent to 3.3 billion kilograms, would occupy about 3.67 million cubic meters.

Now, imagine stacking this volume vertically on a square base measuring 100 meters by 100 meters, roughly the size of a city block. Using simple math (Height = Volume ÷ Area), the UNDP estimate would produce a plastic tower about 367 meters high.

Even with this higher UNDP estimate, the pile wouldn’t reach even 5% of K2’s height of 8,611 meters, let alone the 16,500 meters claimed. If we instead use the more recent 2-million-ton estimate from the SWITCH-Asia “Plastic Policies in Pakistan (2025) report”, it will take up approximately 2.22 million cubic meters and the pile shrinks further to just 222 meters in height.2

For perspective, even if we consider K2’s topographic prominence, how much it rises above its immediate surroundings, which is 4,017 meters3, the plastic stack will still fall drastically short. In fact, you’d need nearly 18 towers of the 222-meter kind stacked on top of one another just to........

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