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%.
[...]
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%.
[...]
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.
[...]
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.
[...]
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.
Thanks for sharing this piece, it's interesting to read about. I've heard similar high-level observations from environmental magazines for years. This article is full of scholarly citations but...
Exemplary
Thanks for sharing this piece, it's interesting to read about. I've heard similar high-level observations from environmental magazines for years. This article is full of scholarly citations but stops short of explaining the specific reasons why low- and middle-income countries haven't been able to solve this problem of waste collection and management.
From some cursory research, it seems like funding for infrastructure and operations is a consistent barrier. The logistics of literally devising, communicating, and orchestrating municipal systems also requires administrative expertise and extraordinary institutional communication. It's hard enough to manage institutions that have decades of experience and inertia; starting from scratch, it's no wonder that uptake is slow:
Local authorities of Asian cities (Asia Development Bank Institute, 1998) see their main challenges [to collection] as:
unplanned growth and increasing pressure to provide services
lack of adequate authority to address people, infrastructure and resourcing problems
bureaucratic confusion and delays due to a multitude of agencies (local, provincial and national level) operating within the same municipal boundaries
lacking accountability
limited communications within the city administration and more importantly between the city administration and the various stakeholders
political interference, as elected representatives often do not confine themselves to strategic planning, policy setting and oversight of performance, but instead become involved in daily operations
lacking skills of municipal workforces, whereby training is often reserved to senior staff and seen as a reward for good work and seen as a chance to break away from the daily obligations
There's clearly a funding gap. And people are mainly incentivized to concern themselves with this problem only to the extent that it affects them directly, which presumably leads to inequitable implementation even within a particular country or region:
Financial and institutional constraints are one of the main reasons for inadequate disposal of waste, especially where local governments are weak or underfinanced and rapid population growth continues. Many governments even have great difficulties when trying to define their actual solid waste management costs, as very often no detailed cost accounting is in place. When solid waste management systems based on user fees are in place, often the fees only barely cover costs of collection and transport leaving practically no financial resources for the safe disposal of waste. Financing this part of the solid waste management cycle is made even more difficult as most people are willing to pay for the removal of the refuse from their immediate environment but then “out of sight – out of mind” are generally not concerned with its ultimate disposal.
Finding a site for a new landfill far away from the urban area, may have the advantage of less public opposition. However, it also means that the site is far away from the source of waste generation thus increasing transfer costs and needing additional investments in the infrastructure of roads, hence intensifying the financial problems of the responsible authorities.
Because research, technology, and standards for disposal are developed by and for high-income contexts, they are too expensive or physically impractical to implement at scale, at speed in low-income countries:
Another reason for sustaining the current disposal practices are insufficient guidelines for determining location, design and operation of new landfills, or for upgrading of old dumps. Often the only guidelines and training materials available are those from high-income countries. These are based on technological standards and practices suited to the conditions and regulations of high-income countries and do not take into account the different technical, economical, social and institutional aspects of developing countries. The responsible authorities, seeing no other solution for their disposal situation, then start searching for waste treatment methods like composting or incineration to alleviate their problems. Such treatment methods however do not eliminate the need of a disposal site.
This one is frustrating because these places first need supporting infrastructure that doesn't exist and can't easily be built. Doing so would require a lot of financial investment and might involve more hard-to-plan-for urban population growth, which would exacerbate the need for waste management. Garbage is also only one of many competing priorities for politicians. I see how it could get out of hand quickly.
One of the author's takeaways:
Solid waste management is definitely not only a technical challenge. Understanding and taking into account the environmental impact, financial and economic calculations, social and cultural issues, and the institutional, political and legal framework, is most crucial for planning and operation of a sustainable solid waste management scheme.
Some corroborating remarks from a researcher studying municipal service implementation in the Middle East:
Although lots of significant efforts have been done in the last few decades in many developing countries supported technically and financially by developed countries and international organizations, substantial reforms in the management of [municipal solid waste] are still not attained. This is due to the fact that frameworks recommended [were] mostly similar to that adopted in developed countries but without seriously addressing the socio-economic differences between the developed and developing countries.
The management activities of MSW are considered public services which are directly controlled by governmental institutions. Such management arrangement is considered weak as it lacks the market mechanisms, and in this case economical incentives cannot be used to improve and develop the MSW management services.
That author talks about formalizing systems of [Sustainable] Integrated Solid Waste Management ([S]-ISWM), which seems like it's come a long way as an academic framework in the last 25 years. I'm glad that researchers are paying attention to this part of the plastic pollution issue!
To overcome these barriers and solve numerous liabilities related to the environment, especially the mountains of MSW discarded in an irregular way, it is necessary to apply facilitating instruments for the social control of public policies, emphasizing [strategic] guidelines, institutional arrangements, legal aspects and financing mechanisms (Schalch and Leite, 2012). Also, to limit more environmental damage caused by MSW, the need now is to identify the ISWM alternatives available that must be the highest combination of accessible alternatives adapted to society (Chand Malav et al., 2020).
Moreover, to achieve a sustainable and integrated solid waste management (S-ISWM), a system must be designed as an integrated system, market oriented (recycled materials and recovered energy for end users) and flexible (capacity for continuous development) with the contribution of stakeholders in relation to their expectations (Marshall and Farahbakhsh, 2013). To guarantee the sustainability of an ISWM system: it must be economically reasonable, environmentally friendly, and socially and legally responsible (Asefi et al., 2020).
It's not clear to me if I can do much to help. Most environmental cleanup charities I know of focus exclusively on downstream waste disposal, like picking up visible trash rather than working with local governments to kickstart expanded municipal collection services to reduce upstream pollution. But I did find a few charities that I think have more of an upstream, logistical focus:
WasteAid: implements "first step resource management" systems with "local communities, informal waste collectors, and authorities to create new waste management systems that are sustainable, affordable, and scalable"
Alliance to End Plastic Waste: trials "end-to-end waste management" systems and a variety of small technological upgrades on the local level to reduce pollution
International Solid Waste Association: works to "enable cities, with the support of their regional and national governments, to move along the waste hierarchy in a coordinated and cohesive manner in order to mitigate methane and black carbon emissions"
I often volunteer locally to pick up trash that's accumulated in parks and alleyways, but as the article says, that makes up a small portion of the unaddressed collection problem globally. I'll continue to do this because I think it's good to be responsible for your own community, even if it's kinda symbolic.
This is a tremendously thorough and insightful post - thank you for that. I want to raise one red flag, though. I’m not familiar with the other two groups you linked related to waste management...
This is a tremendously thorough and insightful post - thank you for that.
I want to raise one red flag, though. I’m not familiar with the other two groups you linked related to waste management work but everyone should be aware that Alliance to End Plastic Waste is an industry front group. If you go to their funding page you’ll see petro, chemical, and plastics companies including TotalEnergies and Dow.
“But what’s the harm if they’re funding municipal waste improvements?” - they donate an extremely small portion of their profits to this group, among others, so they can point to it as their concern for problems of plastic pollution and use it to fight against any other form of regulation or pollution policy, like lifecycle regulations.
Most recently these companies + petrostates defeated a UN treaty to put limits on unnecessary plastics (especially packaging). A majority of participating countries, including a ton of the poorest and most polluted countries in the world, supported the measures, but these companies and their allied petrostates stalled and muddied the waters by claiming it’s SOLELY a waste management issue for which they share no responsibility and succeeded in derailing the process.
Waste management is extremely important, as you outline here. But it isn’t mutually exclusive with limiting unnecessary plastics and both measures are badly necessary.
If macro plastic pollution were to be dealt with (unequivocally a good thing, don't get me wrong) we would be left with micro plastics which are more insidious and largely driven by things like...
If macro plastic pollution were to be dealt with (unequivocally a good thing, don't get me wrong) we would be left with micro plastics which are more insidious and largely driven by things like paint (almost all paint is plastic) and tyre dust from roads. In these the first world occupies its usual spot as the heaviest polluter.
My understanding is that at least some significant fraction of microplastics come from "macroplastic" pollution breaking down, so addressing it also addresses microplastics to at least some...
My understanding is that at least some significant fraction of microplastics come from "macroplastic" pollution breaking down, so addressing it also addresses microplastics to at least some extent. Moreover, the problems with plastic pollution are both pervasive and much better understood than the effects of microplastics (which one would expect, ofc, given how much easier they are to observe. Especially given how poor our current ability to even accurately measure microplastics can be.)
This motivated me to go out and buy a grabber. Already had a bucket, trash bags, and a bungee cord. Picked up five trash bags worth of bud light cans/bottles, some Marlboro packs, and about 9,000...
This motivated me to go out and buy a grabber. Already had a bucket, trash bags, and a bungee cord.
Picked up five trash bags worth of bud light cans/bottles, some Marlboro packs, and about 9,000 nips of Smirnoff. Fuck you people throwing these out of your car windows.
This year was especially depressing after the snow melt compared to normal years.
I will never understand the mentality behind littering. But, ya know, I guess you need to knock back a couple nips worth of vodka before you get home and claim you only had one at the bar. Best throw the evidence away one street before home.
Outside of those items, it was a tiny amount of paper plates, or fast food cups.
Thank you for posting this, I had no idea. Sad this doesn't make it to the top, even on tildes, fact based policy suggestion doesn't drive enough engagement.
Thank you for posting this, I had no idea.
Sad this doesn't make it to the top, even on tildes, fact based policy suggestion doesn't drive enough engagement.
Then I'm pleased to be wrong on that. Third place in activity today! I'm proud of us guys. This post is worth at least as much attention as JKR or LLM post.
Then I'm pleased to be wrong on that.
Third place in activity today! I'm proud of us guys.
This post is worth at least as much attention as JKR or LLM post.
To be fair to you, the topic was probably a bit lower when you made your comment, but your comment would have bumped the topic to the top of the activity sort again which probably netted it a few...
To be fair to you, the topic was probably a bit lower when you made your comment, but your comment would have bumped the topic to the top of the activity sort again which probably netted it a few more votes. So you very likely deserve some of the credit for it getting as high as it is... especially since your comment also got 2 replies, both of which bumped the topic yet again, which then resulted in a few more top-level comments too. Sometimes all it takes it a slight bump to get the ball rolling, and you provided that initial bump. :)
I didn't engage because I mostly agree with the topic, and didn't have much of substance to add beyond an upvote ... countries without expensive, dedicated waste infrastructure will often just...
I didn't engage because I mostly agree with the topic, and didn't have much of substance to add beyond an upvote ... countries without expensive, dedicated waste infrastructure will often just dump it into the nearest body of water (e.g. the Yamuna river (video)). Having enormous population centres built up without infrastructure in mind creates deep seated, knotted problems that will require billions to unravel (you can make this same argument about personal car ownership, too, btw :3).
The only part of this framing I disagree with is the focus on plastic pollution, but I get that it's trendy, so that's most likely to get clicks. Ultimately, good waste management practices help in many other ways, so it's probably not that harmful to focus in on this one part.
Just a few years ago we were in the midst of a full-on climate crisis and, despite nothing changing, we've all but forgotten that this is even happening. The big orange balloon is absorbing most...
Just a few years ago we were in the midst of a full-on climate crisis and, despite nothing changing, we've all but forgotten that this is even happening.
The big orange balloon is absorbing most of the oxygen in all rooms, I get that, but I guess I was more hopeful that we'd (the media, individuals, governments) would pay at least some lip service to mitigation efforts.
Not sure what you mean since there are news stories about climate change and alternative energy all the time and it’s a common subject of conversation. A lot of the news has been bad, though.
Not sure what you mean since there are news stories about climate change and alternative energy all the time and it’s a common subject of conversation.
There are, it's just faded from the public consciousness, and from what I can see, the desks of legislators and politicians responsible for spending money and making hard choices.
There are, it's just faded from the public consciousness, and from what I can see, the desks of legislators and politicians responsible for spending money and making hard choices.
From the article:
[...]
[...]
[...]
[...]
Thanks for sharing this piece, it's interesting to read about. I've heard similar high-level observations from environmental magazines for years. This article is full of scholarly citations but stops short of explaining the specific reasons why low- and middle-income countries haven't been able to solve this problem of waste collection and management.
From some cursory research, it seems like funding for infrastructure and operations is a consistent barrier. The logistics of literally devising, communicating, and orchestrating municipal systems also requires administrative expertise and extraordinary institutional communication. It's hard enough to manage institutions that have decades of experience and inertia; starting from scratch, it's no wonder that uptake is slow:
There's clearly a funding gap. And people are mainly incentivized to concern themselves with this problem only to the extent that it affects them directly, which presumably leads to inequitable implementation even within a particular country or region:
Because research, technology, and standards for disposal are developed by and for high-income contexts, they are too expensive or physically impractical to implement at scale, at speed in low-income countries:
This one is frustrating because these places first need supporting infrastructure that doesn't exist and can't easily be built. Doing so would require a lot of financial investment and might involve more hard-to-plan-for urban population growth, which would exacerbate the need for waste management. Garbage is also only one of many competing priorities for politicians. I see how it could get out of hand quickly.
One of the author's takeaways:
Zurbrügg, C. (2000) “Urban Solid Waste Management in Low-Income Countries of Asia How to Cope with the Garbage Crisis,” Asian Symposium on Programming Languages and Systems.
Some corroborating remarks from a researcher studying municipal service implementation in the Middle East:
Khatib, Imad. (2011). Municipal Solid Waste Management in Developing Countries: Future Challenges and Possible Opportunities. 10.5772/16438.
That author talks about formalizing systems of [Sustainable] Integrated Solid Waste Management ([S]-ISWM), which seems like it's come a long way as an academic framework in the last 25 years. I'm glad that researchers are paying attention to this part of the plastic pollution issue!
Batista, Marco. (2021). "A framework for sustainable and integrated municipal solid waste management: Barriers and critical factors to developing countries," Journal of Cleaner Production, Volume 312.
It's not clear to me if I can do much to help. Most environmental cleanup charities I know of focus exclusively on downstream waste disposal, like picking up visible trash rather than working with local governments to kickstart expanded municipal collection services to reduce upstream pollution. But I did find a few charities that I think have more of an upstream, logistical focus:
I often volunteer locally to pick up trash that's accumulated in parks and alleyways, but as the article says, that makes up a small portion of the unaddressed collection problem globally. I'll continue to do this because I think it's good to be responsible for your own community, even if it's kinda symbolic.
This is a tremendously thorough and insightful post - thank you for that.
I want to raise one red flag, though. I’m not familiar with the other two groups you linked related to waste management work but everyone should be aware that Alliance to End Plastic Waste is an industry front group. If you go to their funding page you’ll see petro, chemical, and plastics companies including TotalEnergies and Dow.
“But what’s the harm if they’re funding municipal waste improvements?” - they donate an extremely small portion of their profits to this group, among others, so they can point to it as their concern for problems of plastic pollution and use it to fight against any other form of regulation or pollution policy, like lifecycle regulations.
Most recently these companies + petrostates defeated a UN treaty to put limits on unnecessary plastics (especially packaging). A majority of participating countries, including a ton of the poorest and most polluted countries in the world, supported the measures, but these companies and their allied petrostates stalled and muddied the waters by claiming it’s SOLELY a waste management issue for which they share no responsibility and succeeded in derailing the process.
Waste management is extremely important, as you outline here. But it isn’t mutually exclusive with limiting unnecessary plastics and both measures are badly necessary.
If macro plastic pollution were to be dealt with (unequivocally a good thing, don't get me wrong) we would be left with micro plastics which are more insidious and largely driven by things like paint (almost all paint is plastic) and tyre dust from roads. In these the first world occupies its usual spot as the heaviest polluter.
My understanding is that at least some significant fraction of microplastics come from "macroplastic" pollution breaking down, so addressing it also addresses microplastics to at least some extent. Moreover, the problems with plastic pollution are both pervasive and much better understood than the effects of microplastics (which one would expect, ofc, given how much easier they are to observe. Especially given how poor our current ability to even accurately measure microplastics can be.)
This motivated me to go out and buy a grabber. Already had a bucket, trash bags, and a bungee cord.
Picked up five trash bags worth of bud light cans/bottles, some Marlboro packs, and about 9,000 nips of Smirnoff. Fuck you people throwing these out of your car windows.
This year was especially depressing after the snow melt compared to normal years.
I will never understand the mentality behind littering. But, ya know, I guess you need to knock back a couple nips worth of vodka before you get home and claim you only had one at the bar. Best throw the evidence away one street before home.
Outside of those items, it was a tiny amount of paper plates, or fast food cups.
Thank you for posting this, I had no idea.
Sad this doesn't make it to the top, even on tildes, fact based policy suggestion doesn't drive enough engagement.
It's the 6th highest voted topic on the entire site over the last 24 hours. I wouldn't exactly call that a flop.
Then I'm pleased to be wrong on that.
Third place in activity today! I'm proud of us guys.
This post is worth at least as much attention as JKR or LLM post.
To be fair to you, the topic was probably a bit lower when you made your comment, but your comment would have bumped the topic to the top of the activity sort again which probably netted it a few more votes. So you very likely deserve some of the credit for it getting as high as it is... especially since your comment also got 2 replies, both of which bumped the topic yet again, which then resulted in a few more top-level comments too. Sometimes all it takes it a slight bump to get the ball rolling, and you provided that initial bump. :)
I didn't engage because I mostly agree with the topic, and didn't have much of substance to add beyond an upvote ... countries without expensive, dedicated waste infrastructure will often just dump it into the nearest body of water (e.g. the Yamuna river (video)). Having enormous population centres built up without infrastructure in mind creates deep seated, knotted problems that will require billions to unravel (you can make this same argument about personal car ownership, too, btw :3).
The only part of this framing I disagree with is the focus on plastic pollution, but I get that it's trendy, so that's most likely to get clicks. Ultimately, good waste management practices help in many other ways, so it's probably not that harmful to focus in on this one part.
Just a few years ago we were in the midst of a full-on climate crisis and, despite nothing changing, we've all but forgotten that this is even happening.
The big orange balloon is absorbing most of the oxygen in all rooms, I get that, but I guess I was more hopeful that we'd (the media, individuals, governments) would pay at least some lip service to mitigation efforts.
Not sure what you mean since there are news stories about climate change and alternative energy all the time and it’s a common subject of conversation.
A lot of the news has been bad, though.
There are, it's just faded from the public consciousness, and from what I can see, the desks of legislators and politicians responsible for spending money and making hard choices.