(ICN) BURNING PLASTIC WASTE

Several global trends are colliding with disastrous consequences for health and the environment, new research warns.

Plastic production has skyrocketed since the 1950s, from a few million tons a year to nearly half a billion tons today, and is on track to triple by 2060. And since just a small fraction of plastics is recycled, millions of tons of plastic—derived from fossil fuels and loaded with toxic chemical additives—enter the environment as waste every year. That staggering figure is also likely to triple by midcentury.

For decades, the United States and other high-income countries have exported their plastic waste to low-income countries in the Global South, many ill-equipped to manage the burgeoning waste stream. At the same time, billions of people across sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Latin America lack access to clean cooking fuels, adequate sanitation or waste-management services. As urbanization accelerates at an unprecedented rate across those regions, city dwellers living in extreme poverty often resort to burning debris from the massive mounds of plastic waste that inundate their communities.

Concerned that desperately poor people are increasingly turning to plastic waste as a cheap, convenient fuel, an international team of researchers set out to gauge the prevalence and nature of this emerging public health crisis.

In a survey of more than 1,000 people who work with low-income urban communities across the Global South, the team found that people living in slums without power hookups in more than two dozen countries are burning the plastic waste that surrounds their communities to cook, heat their homes and dispose of garbage.

In a previous paper, a subset of the authors cited anecdotal reports that increasing numbers of poor people living in slums without basic waste-disposal and energy services have resorted to burning plastic trash as an alternative fuel. More of this article (Inside Climate News) - link - more like this (plastic) - link - more like this (sub-Saharan Africa) - link