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More than half of uncollected plastic garbage is burned
Tim Gainey/Alamy
Around 1.5 billion people around the world do not have access to garbage collection services, and how they dispose of their plastic waste has become a serious environmental problem.
Most of these households resort to burning their plastic waste or dumping it in the environment, according to a new analysis, which argues comprehensive collection services are the only way to make a dent in global plastic pollution.
Costas Velis at the University of Leeds, UK, and his colleagues used waste data from local governments, as well as census data, to model the flow of plastic waste in city regions around the world. An AI algorithm was then trained on this data to predict how waste is generated and dealt with for more than 50,000 city regions globally.
This bottom-up approach provides an “unprecedented” look at how plastic waste is treated and why it becomes pollution in different countries, says Velis. “It hasn’t been done before,” he says.
Velis’s team estimates that 52.1 million tonnes of plastic waste, a fifth of the global total, becomes pollution every year, mostly generated in poorer countries where garbage collections are unreliable or non-existent. Instead of being dealt with properly, most of this plastic waste is incinerated in homes, on streets or in small dumps, without any environmental controls.
Around 57 per cent of uncollected plastic garbage is dealt with in this way, the researchers estimate, with the remaining 43 per cent left to litter the environment. Burning plastic not only produces greenhouse gases, but also releases cancer-causing dioxins, particulate pollution and heavy metals, all of which are damaging to human health.
In general, low-income countries produce much less plastic waste per person, but much more of that waste ends up polluting the environment. In higher-income countries, by comparison, the vast majority of waste is collected and processed, with littering the largest cause of plastic pollution.
The findings underscore the need for low-income countries to receive support to establish comprehensive waste collections for all citizens, says Velis. India, Nigeria and Indonesia were flagged as the countries with the highest plastic pollution rates.
The research comes ahead of talks set to take place in November in Busan, South Korea, where countries will consider adopting the world’s first plastic waste treaty. Velis is calling for the treaty to contain measures requiring countries to steadily increase the proportion of their waste handled by proper facilities, with high-income countries providing greater funding assistance. “The absence of waste collection is the biggest contributor to the [plastic pollution] problem,” he says.
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