British plastics researchers respond after coming under fire for “misleading” waste management narratives

10 Sep 2024 --- Researchers at the University of Leeds, UK, are being criticized by environmentalists over a recent study into global macroplastic pollution, which highlighted disproportionate levels of waste incineration and emissions in countries in the Global South. The study authors say their findings could inform the UN Global Plastic Treaty, but critics say the research ignores a fundamental “waste colonialism” narrative.

Macroplastics are plastic items with a diameter larger than 5 mm, distinguished from microplastics, which are smaller than 5 mm. 

The study, titled “A local-to-global emissions inventory of macroplastic pollution,” used AI to model waste management in 50,000 municipalities worldwide. It calculated over 52 million tons of waste and showed the localities with different waste generation and disposal methods. 

The findings show that over 1.2 billion people live without basic plastic waste management infrastructure and subsequently resort to informal incineration, burning trash in the streets and community dumpsites. The most polluting countries were found to be India, Nigeria and Indonesia. 

But Therese Karlsson, a science advisor with the International Pollutants Elimination Network (IPEN) in Sweden, says the study excludes many significant sources of plastic pollution and ignores the “devastating consequences of massive plastic waste exports sent from higher-income countries to low- and middle-income countries.” 

“This study creates an extremely dangerous and false impression that the US and European countries have little role in creating the plastics crisis,” she says. 

The researchers have responded, saying that they have studied waste colonialism at length in previous papers and that the impact of exports into the Global South is negligible enough to leave this aspect out. 

Research parameters 

Incineration is a far bigger cause of emissions in the Global South.The research is published in Nature, and ranks countries according to emissions footprint, showing the majority of countries in the Global North (US and Western Europe) produce the lowest plastic waste emissions.

However, according to the non-profit organization Break Free From Plastic, the report’s focus on uncollected waste and open burning disregards pollution caused by the extraction of raw materials and plastic production.

“The study defines ‘plastic emissions’ in the narrowest possible way,” says Swathi Seshadri of the Centre for Financial Accountability (India). 

“One of the critical issues with this study is that it assumes plastic pollution begins when the product is discarded rather than with the source material: primary plastic polymers, which impacts people, animals, soil, water and every other naturally existing life forms on this planet.”

Ed Cook, one of the study authors and research fellow in Circular Economy Systems for Waste Plastics at Leeds, tells us: “Our narrow definition was quite deliberate. We have explicitly attempted to bring scientific clarity to a specific aspect of plastic pollution which differentiates macroplastic debris and open burning emissions from all other sources.” 

“Our clearly delineated use of ‘macroplastic emissions’ differentiates between plastic from physical objects which are emitted from human-controlled systems and those which are accounted for elsewhere. These include those forms of plastic production, air pollution, GHG emissions, biodiversity, micro- and nano plastics.”  

International perspectives 

BFFP also criticizes the study’s focus on national-level data, which it says obscures the critical role that multinational corporations and the plastic industry play globally by perpetuating a shift from traditional non-toxic packaging to millions of tons of single-use plastic and food containers. 

“Among the most insidious of these industry practices is selling products in throw-away sachets, which are the most common plastic discards found in brand audits in Africa and Asia. A recent Asia-focused brand audit report ranked the Global North corporations Unilever, Nestlé and Procter & Gamble among the top sachet polluters,” the organization says. 

Waste exports make a negligible difference to the disproportionate emissions levels in global regions, say the researchers.Cook responds: “We considered very carefully whether to try to incorporate transboundary trade (exports) into our current effort, but as we highlight in the paper, the issue has reduced substantially in recent years as a result of successive import bans across the Global South and amendments to the Basel Convention.”

“We suggest that the mass of plastic which is emitted from exports is around 0.3 million tons per year — a very small amount (0.6% wt.) of the 52 million tons which we estimate.” 

“Some recent work has highlighted that waste exports may be larger than previous studies have stated through hidden and indirect sources. However, even in an unlikely case that exports are double the amount reported, the emissions would still be very small in comparison to the mass of emissions from other sources,” he says. 

Influencing the UN Global Plastic Treaty 

Nonetheless, BFFP asserts the study’s model is particularly troublesome in that it is geared toward influencing the upcoming UN Global Plastic Treaty negotiations (INC-5) in November. “Given the report’s intent to inform the INC-5, this study dangerously paints a false narrative and fails to inspire much-needed systemic solutions,” the organization remarks. 

Cook says the core benefit of the research for the UN Global Plastic Treaty negotiators is that its findings provide governments with a measurable local scale baseline of plastic pollution. 

“It means they can assess plastic pollution in every corner of their country so that they can focus their often scarce resources where the challenges are most acute. As our model links plastic pollution to sources and activities, they will be able to target their actions toward more specific interventions.” 

“For example, high-income countries may want to focus their attention on littering or waste collection quality. In some lower-income countries, it is likely that they will need to focus on expanding waste collection services. And in some of the transitory upper middle-income countries which have an almost complete waste collection, they may want to focus attention on increasing the quality and management of land disposal facilities or even moving away from land disposal entirely,” adds Cook. 

Meanwhile, Dr. Costas Velis, one of the research authors, says the findings also show an urgent global human health issue and an ongoing crisis: “People whose waste is not collected have no option but to dump or burn it: setting the plastics on fire may seem to make them ‘disappear,’ but in fact, the open burning of plastic waste can lead to substantial human health damage including neurodevelopmental, reproductive and birth defects.” 

By Louis Gore-Langton