Worldwide plastic waste totals more than 57 million tons a year, with India creating more than any other country, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
Researchers found that India generates some 10.2 million tons per year of plastic waste, defined as that which ends up in the open environment rather than landfills. This is equivalent to nearly 20 percent of the global output. Researchers, led by Costas Velis of the University of Leeds’ School of Civil Engineering, determined that India has a 10:1 ratio of plastic dump sites, or disposal sites directly into the environment, to sanitary landfills.
Moreover, the authors wrote that this is likely an undercount, citing evidence that the official statistics for India exclude numbers for disposal in rural regions and open burning of uncollected plastic.
Nigeria generates the second most plastic pollution of any country, but the amount, 3.9 million tons, is less than half that of India. Although earlier studies have estimated that China is the number one source of plastic waste, the researchers ranked it only fourth, citing more recent data that it says indicate significant progress on waste disposal.
While researchers found much of the plastic waste comes from the global south, they also found countries recommended across income brackets among the biggest plastic polluters. Just under 70 percent of annual plastic waste comes from 20 countries, of which four are low-income, nine are medium-income and seven are upper-middle-income.
Although high-income countries are major generators of plastic waste, most of them have reliable controlled disposal services, keeping any of them from making the top 90 countries in the study.
The U.S. ranked relatively low among nations for plastic waste, generating about 52,500 tons a year, the 90th most of any country.
Beyond the country-by-country breakdown, an April study published in the journal Science Advances estimated that five companies comprise a quarter of global plastic pollution. A February study by the group Beyond Plastics, meanwhile, estimated that a large majority of plastics are consigned to landfills rather than fully recycled.
