More than 52 million tonnes of plastic were dumped into the environment in 2020, according to a study published in the journal “Nature”, which highlights the dangers of the frequent use of wild incineration of this waste.
The figure is staggering. No less than 52.1 million tonnes of plastic were dumped into the environment in 2020, according to a global inventory devoted to this problem, published Wednesday, September 4 in the journal Nature by a team of researchers from the University of Leeds (United Kingdom).
India is the biggest polluter, with 9.3 million tonnes of plastic, nearly a fifth of the global total, reflecting its large population but also the fact that most of the waste is not collected. This uncollected waste is also the main source of plastic pollution in the Global South, according to the study. India is followed by Nigeria (3.5 million tonnes) and Indonesia (3.4 million).
First world treaty
China (2.8 million tonnes), which was considered the biggest polluter in previous assessments, only ranks fourth in the study, just ahead of Russia. This “reflects our use of data that are more up to date and show substantial progress in the adoption of waste incineration and controlled landfill,” greet the authors about this country.
They used artificial intelligence tools to model waste management in 50,702 municipalities around the world. They hope their findings – which complement other sometimes conflicting assessments by the UN and the OECD – will feed into leaders’ discussions in Busan, South Korea, later this year, aimed at setting in stone a first global treaty to combat plastic pollution.
“Lack of good quality data”
“In the past, policymakers have struggled to address this problem, partly because of a lack of good quality data,” says Ed Cook, one of the study’s authors. He says he hopes the study will help them “to allocate resources, which are scarce, to effectively tackle plastic pollution.”
According to researchers, 30 million tonnes of plastic (57% of the total released into the environment) were burned without any control in 2020. However, these incinerations in homes, on the street or in illegal dumps can have dangerous effects. “Setting fire to plastic may appear to make it ‘disappear’, Costas Velis, the lead author, points out: but open burning can result in substantial damage to human health – including birth defects, neurodevelopmental or reproductive harm – and a much wider dispersion of environmental pollution.”
