52 million tons of plastic slips into the environment every year

An estimated 52 million metric tons of plastic is spilling uncontrolled into the environment every year, according to a new study ( Nature 2024, DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-07758-6 ). By weight, 43% of this waste ends up as litter. People dispose of the other 57% by burning it in waste pits or by other unregulated methods that lack environmental controls. This uncontrolled waste accounted for over 20% of all of the plastic waste generated from municipal sources in 2020. The researchers, at the University of Leeds, used a machine learning model to find that the amount of such plastic pollution was highest in southern and southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. According to this model, the world’s biggest emitter of plastic pollution was India at about 9.3 million metric tons of plastic pollution per year. India is also the world’s most populous country, with around 1.43 billion people in 2023, according to the