When quantifying German production of plastic packaging, it is not enough to study the data provided by the Federal Statistics Office. The reason is that applications for film and hollow bodies overlap with other industrial sectors such as building/construction, agriculture and transportationl electrical equipment The official statistics take into account the output by plants with more than 20 employees, the published numbers of bottles, jars and other large containers have to be converted into mass units in order to arrive at the total packaging tonnage. Once these obstacles have been negotiated, the results show that plastic packaging in the last decade has grown 70 % in terms of weight and 55 % in terms of value.