India has been clubbed along with China, the US, Japan, Brazil and Germany for producing most total waste through unregulated trash burning.
But the nations with the greatest emissions from this are populous developing countries: China, India, Brazil, Mexico, Pakistan, and Turkey.
This is the outcome of a study led by the US National Centre for Atmospheric Research.
Unregulated trash burning around the globe is pumping far more pollution into the atmosphere than shown by official records.
More than 40 per cent of the world’s garbage is burned in such fires, emitting gases and particles that can substantially affect human health and climate change.
The global impact on greenhouse gas emissions appears to be less, though still significant, with burning trash producing an estimated five per cent of human-related carbon dioxide emissions.
NOT REPORTED
By comparison, the Kyoto Protocol strove for a global five per cent cut in greenhouse-gas emissions from industrialised countries.
Emissions from burning trash in open fires often go unreported to environmental agencies and are left out of many national inventories of air pollution.
For that reason, they are not incorporated into policy making, according to Christine Wiedinmyer, lead author of the study.
Because trash burning is unregulated and unmonitored, she said that actual emissions could be larger or smaller than the study’s estimates by a factor of two.
ON THE RISE
The amount of garbage burned in remote villages and crowded megacities is likely on the rise, as more people worldwide are consuming more goods.
The trash often contains discarded plastics and electronics as well as traditional materials such as food scraps and wood.
Wiedinmyer and her co-authors compared population figures and per capita waste production with official tallies of trash disposal for each country in the world.
They estimated that 1.1 billion tonnes, or 41 percent, of the total waste generated worldwide is disposed of through unregulated burning every year.
By analysing consumption patterns in each country, the research team then estimated the type and amount of pollutants from the fires.