Uncollected waste and open burning leading causes of the plastic pollution crisis

Date: September 4, 2024
Source: University of Leeds
Summary: A new study shines a light on the enormous scale of uncollected rubbish and open burning of plastic waste in the first ever global plastics pollution inventory. Researchers used A.I. to model waste management in more than 50,000 municipalities around the world. This model allowed the team to predict how much waste was generated globally and what happens to it.

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Their study, published in the journal Nature, calculated a staggering 52 million tonnes of plastic products entered the environment in 2020 -- which, laid out in a line would stretch around the World over 1,500 times.

It also revealed that more than two thirds of the planet's plastic pollution comes from uncollected rubbish with almost 1.2 billion people -- 15% of the global population -- living without access to waste collection services.

The findings further show that in 2020 roughly 30 million tonnes of plastics -- amounting to 57% of all plastic pollution -- was burned without any environmental controls in place, in homes, on streets and in dumpsites. Burning plastic comes with 'substantial' threats to human health, including neurodevelopmental, reproductive and birth defects.

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A local-to-global emissions inventory of macroplastic pollution

Joshua W. Cottom, Ed Cook & Costas A. Velis

Nature volume 633, pages101–108 (2024)

Abstract
Negotiations for a global treaty on plastic pollution1 will shape future policies on plastics production, use and waste management. Its parties will benefit from a high-resolution baseline of waste flows and plastic emission sources to enable identification of pollution hotspots and their causes2. Nationally aggregated waste management data can be distributed to smaller scales to identify generalized points of plastic accumulation and source phenomena3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11. However, it is challenging to use this type of spatial allocation to assess the conditions under which emissions take place12,13. Here we develop a global macroplastic pollution emissions inventory by combining conceptual modelling of emission mechanisms with measurable activity data. We define emissions as materials that have moved from the managed or mismanaged system (controlled or contained state) to the unmanaged system (uncontrolled or uncontained state—the environment). Using machine learning and probabilistic material flow analysis, we identify emission hotspots across 50,702 municipalities worldwide from five land-based plastic waste emission sources. We estimate global plastic waste emissions at 52.1 [48.3–56.3] million metric tonnes (Mt) per year, with approximately 57% wt. and 43% wt. open burned and unburned debris, respectively. Littering is the largest emission source in the Global North, whereas uncollected waste is the dominant emissions source across the Global South. We suggest that our findings can help inform treaty negotiations and develop national and sub-national waste management action plans and source inventories.

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a, Mean macroplastic emissions by country. b, Probability distributions of macroplastic emissions for six global cities >1 million population. c, Country-level macroplastic emissions by income category. Black dots are individual country results in each income category. The lower and upper hinges of the box plots correspond to the first and third quartiles and the central line is the median. Whiskers extend to the data point no further than 1.5 times the interquartile range from the hinge.