Polymers are essential for the automotive industry, the aircraft industry and medical devices due to their combination of lightness and strength. However, performance of polymers might decrease with their degradation and wear studies become necessary to ensure both usefulness and safety during their operation time. This article studies the physical phenomena involved in the abrasion of nine common polymers using surface topography. Polymer disks are cut from polymer rods, followed by a mirror-polishing and then by abrasion with silicon carbide abrasive papers from grades 80 to 4000. A white light interferometer is used to measure high-resolution over a large field-of-view topographies of the polymer disk surfaces thanks to stitching. To determine the scale of applications of physical phenomena involved in the abrasion process, four multiscale roughness decompositions are applied on topography and compared: the patchwork method, the box Sa method, the box Sz method and the motif method. All multiscale analyses have detected a cross-over separating micro and macro abrasion for all polymers and abrasive paper grades. A new parameter, the Abrasive Ratio Ar, is introduced, representing the ratio between the penetration depth of the abrasive grain into the polymer disk over the abrasive grain size. This parameter helps the identification of four abrasion wear mechanisms and their scale of applications: the hydrostatic limit stage (80   µm and higher), the strain hardening stage (30   µm – 80   µm), the localized adhesion stage (10   µm – 30   µm) and the grit size effect stage (10   µm and smaller).