In countries with good waste management systems, far less plastic pollutes the environment. Across high-income countries, plastic pollution per person is 100 times lower than in lower-income countries.
If every country managed its waste in this way, the world would cut plastic pollution by more than 98%.
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Clearly, people in high-income countries don’t produce 100 times less pollution than those in lower-income countries because they use less plastic. Per person, they use much more.
The huge difference in pollution rates is a consequence of how waste is managed. In high-income countries, most waste is collected and sent to controlled landfills or to facilities that incinerate or recycle it.
In many low- and middle-income countries, people find themselves in a very different situation: less than half of solid household waste is collected. People often have little choice but to burn or dump it. But even the waste that is collected is often left in open dumps, where it’s at risk of leaking into the environment.
Most pollution, then, comes from uncollected waste and poorly managed disposal sites. You can see this in the chart.
What, then, is causing plastic pollution in rich countries? Roughly half comes from littering: people thoughtlessly chucking their plastic bottles, wrappers, and bags. If we built a world where people don’t do this, we could increase that 98% reduction to 99%.
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Cutting plastic use in rich countries has very little impact on global plastic pollution: the world’s high-income countries generate less than 0.5% of the total.
Reducing use in low- and middle-income countries could certainly help. But even large reductions wouldn’t get close to eliminating pollution. If one in every five kilograms of plastic waste in these countries ends up as pollution, even halving plastic waste would still leave tens of millions of tonnes leaking into the environment each year.
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Improving waste management systems in low- and middle-income countries is therefore crucial. Getting there does not require fancy solutions. It needs investment in very basic infrastructure in the right places.
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To most, this won’t sound like a particularly attractive way to spend money. Who really wants to invest in waste collection trucks and landfills? Not many. But for those passionate about ending plastic pollution, this is where attention and resources could make the biggest difference. Making the case for waste management and ways to make these processes and infrastructure cheaper could be the best thing you do to stop bottles clogging the world’s rivers and toxic pollution filling the air.
We already have the knowledge and tools to reduce global plastic pollution to just 2% of its current levels. With the right focus and investment, most of it is preventable.
From the article:
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