Publisher Summary This chapter provides an overview of the global plastics industry today and tomorrow. It indicates the orders of magnitude of global plastics consumption. It also shows the market shares by weight of the main thermoplastics versus total thermoplastics in the main industrialized countries. It presents schematically the approximate market shares consumed by different application sectors for plastics as a whole. The consumption of thermoplastics predominates but the market share distribution of the thermoplastic application sectors is nevertheless somewhat different from that of plastics as a whole. For each type of polymer, there are several possible processing methods from which it will be necessary to choose to best suit the required geometries, production rates, targeted properties and economic context. The study reports the consumption of the major thermoplastics in 2005 for the three main geographic areas, together with market shares and average annual growth rates (AAGR). These identified thermoplastics represent roughly 70% of the overall global consumption of plastics. Polymeric materials are intrinsically expensive, but their use becomes appealing if one takes into account the processing costs, the new technical possibilities that they permit and the total cost at the end of their lifetime.