According to what is described as the ‘first global inventory of plastic pollution,’ some 52 million tonnes of plastic product waste found its way into the environment worldwide during 2020.
The findings have been reported by researchers from the University of Leeds, UK who used AI to model waste management in more than 50,000 municipalities around the world. The researchers have also been able to predict how much waste was generated globally - and what happened to it.
As well as setting out the volume of plastic waste the research, which is published in the journal Nature, indicates that during 2020 an estimated 30 million tonnes of plastic was burned without any environmental controls in place. The researchers highlighted the burning plastic comes with ‘substantial’ threats to human health, including neurodevelopmental, reproductive, and birth defects.
“We need to start focusing much, much more on tackling open burning and uncollected waste before more lives are needlessly impacted by plastic pollution. It cannot be out of sight out of mind,” said Dr Costas Velis from the School of Civil Engineering at the University of Leeds. Uncollected waste is the biggest source of plastic pollution, with at least 1.2 billion people living without waste collection services forced to ‘self-manage’ waste, often by dumping it on land, in rivers, or burning it in open fires, the researchers said.
Looking at the locations of the worst plastic pollution, the findings estimate that during 2020, the largest amount of plastic pollution was emitted in India with some 9.3 million tonnes, followed by Nigeria, 3.5 million tonnes, and then Indonesia with 3.4 million tonnes. China, which had been reported as the country with highest volume of plastic waste came in fourth on the study. The falloff in plastic waste in China, down to 2.8 million tonnes, was attributed to improvement in collecting and processing waste in recent years. The research team note that UK was ranked 135th in the world with around 4,000 tonnes of plastic waste each year, largely created by littering.
The new research comes ahead of the fifth Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC-5) on Plastic Pollution which will take place in Busan, Korea, in November. Calling for a plastics treaty informed by science the researchers said that their work provides a baseline – comparable to those for climate change emissions – that can be used by policymakers to ‘tackle this looming environmental disaster.’
Ed Cook, research fellow in Circular Economy Systems for Waste Plastics at the University of Leeds said “Existing official records around the world do not sufficiently reflect reality because the ways in which so much waste is dealt with – like being burned and dumped – is unmeasured and undocumented. In the past policymakers have struggled to tackle this problem, partly because of the scarcity of good quality data. We hope that our detailed local scale dataset will help decision makers to allocate scarce resources to address plastic pollution efficiently.”
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