For decades, the United States and other high-income countries have exported their plastic waste<\/a> to low-income countries in the Global South<\/a>, 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<\/a>, adequate sanitation<\/a> or waste-management services. As urbanization accelerates at an unprecedented rate<\/a> 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n In the new study<\/a>, published in Nature Communications, the team surveyed researchers, government workers and community leaders who work with low-income neighborhoods in 26 countries<\/a> to better understand a growing health threat that has largely escaped scrutiny.<\/p>\n A third of respondents said it\u2019s common practice to burn plastic waste in traditional cookers, including mud stoves and \u201cthree stone<\/a>\u201d fires. Nearly half of the respondents had witnessed people burning waste to cook meals, while more than a third had seen people burn plastic to heat their homes. Some of the respondents reported doing both themselves.<\/p>\n \u201cPlastic pollution is not just an environmental problem, it\u2019s a daily health and survival issue for tens of millions of people,\u201d said Hari Vuthaluru, a study co-author and professor of chemical engineering at Curtin University\u2019s Western Australian School of Mines.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIf we are serious about climate action and environmental justice, we cannot ignore the hidden practice of plastic burning,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Public interest groups have campaigned<\/a> for measures to reduce plastic pollution for years, but no global efforts aim to curb the production, use and disposal of plastics. The United Nations plastic pollution talks ended without a treaty<\/a> in August, as the U.S. and other major plastic-producing countries rejected demands to stem production, led by countries in the Global South, which bear the disproportionate burden of plastic pollution.\u00a0<\/p>\n Waste-management infrastructure in many rapidly urbanizing regions has lagged behind the dramatic increase in plastic production, Vuthaluru said, turning low-income communities into plastic dumping grounds.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s fantastic that they did such a large study in 26 countries,\u201d said Lisa Thompson, a professor in the Department of Family Health Care Nursing at the University of California, San Francisco, who was not involved in the study. \u201cI think it gives a really good overview of what\u2019s happening and sensitizing people to this issue.\u201d<\/p>\n Since plastic is made from fossil fuels, it quickly ignites, giving cash-strapped slum dwellers a cheap, easy fuel source while they chip away at the mountains of trash around their homes. But these easily ignitable plastics are also made of thousands of harmful chemical additives<\/a>.<\/p>\n Plastic combustion releases highly toxic substances that include particulate matter, heavy metals, cancer-causing dioxins<\/a> and furans<\/a>, and scores of other compounds that accumulate in the food chain and people\u2019s bodies. Inhaling these compounds causes diverse health problems, including chronic respiratory and breathing problems and cardiovascular stress.<\/p>\n Toxic plastic residues from open fires and makeshift stoves routinely rain down on densely packed neighborhoods and foul the inside of homes, water sources, soil, crops and the food that\u2019s being prepared for meals or distribution. In one high-profile example, reported in The New York Times<\/a>, plastic waste burned as fuel by tofu makers in an Indonesian village tainted tofu and the eggs of local chickens with dioxin and other deadly chemicals.\u00a0<\/p>\n And that harmful plastic packaging often stores even more hazardous materials. Of the 366 respondents who said plastic waste was burned as household fuel, nearly two-thirds said people burned plastic containers that held cleaning liquids, fertilizers and pesticides.\u00a0<\/p>\n A Hidden Problem<\/p>\n Many people who burn these materials also lack access to information about the dangers they pose. Those who know about the risks are forced to choose between forgoing heat and cooked meals or being exposed to hazardous substances.<\/p>\n There\u2019s a lot of attention paid to microplastics and people\u2019s exposure through drinking, eating and wearing clothes, Thompson said. But risks from burning plastics have received less attention, said Thompson, who has studied<\/a> that hazard in Indigenous villages in Guatemala.<\/p>\n People use plastic to start their fires because it burns so fast, and it\u2019s not unusual to see piles of bottles and bags for kindling alongside logs in people\u2019s homes in Guatemala, she said. Then when they open a bag of pasta or rice, they often toss the empty bag into the fire to get rid of the plastic.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen you walk by a house that\u2019s burning plastic, you can smell it right away\u2014it\u2019s awful,\u201d she said. \u201cA sharp, acrid, pungent smell, like burning tires.\u201d<\/p>\n Nearly 40 percent of the world\u2019s population burns solid fuels for cooking, and now, on top of that, they\u2019re burning plastic, Thompson said. \u201cIt\u2019s an expanding problem that I think not many people are aware of but should be.\u201d<\/p>\n While studying problems with waste management and energy access in low-income urban communities over the past decade, the team behind the latest study kept hearing stories about people burning plastic waste.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWhat actually struck us was that this practice was widely known locally, but it was almost invisible in the academic literature and policy discussions,\u201d Vuthaluru said. \u201cThat gap or that gray area is what actually motivated us to get into this global study.\u201d<\/p>\n Discussions around environmental and energy policies in developing countries tend to focus on formal systems like power plants while ignoring informal, household-level realities in low-income communities, Vuthaluru said.<\/p>\n \u201cThere is also a hidden assumption, or rather implicit assumption, that development will eventually solve these problems,\u201d he said. Such assumptions, he added, delay urgently needed action.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is an issue that has largely been happening out of sight in communities and has been difficult to get accurate data on,\u201d said Bishal Bharadwaj, a Curtin Institute researcher and lead author on the study, in a statement.\u00a0<\/p>\n The study is the first to provide broad global evidence of households burning plastic to not only dispose of waste but also cook food, heat homes, light fires and keep insects away, Bharadwaj said.<\/p>\n This story is funded by readers like you.<\/p>\n Our nonprofit newsroom provides award-winning climate coverage free of charge and advertising. We rely on donations from readers like you to keep going. Please donate now to support our work.<\/p>\n Donate Now<\/a> <\/p>\n
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