For example, as much as 29 percent of global anthropogenic emissions of small particulate matter (tiny solid particles and liquid droplets from dust to metals that can penetrate deep into the lungs) come from trash fires, she estimates. The more interesting and concerning story to Wiedinmyer are the other pollutants, which accounted for far bigger percentages of global emissions. But the carbon dioxide that comes from trash burning can be a significant source in some countries and regions, and it is one not reflected in the official greenhouse gas inventories for those places. Those emissions are dwarfed by others sources on the global scale, such as cars and power plants, amounting to just 5 percent of total global carbon dioxide emissions. What she found was that some 1.1 billion tons of waste, more than 40 percent of the world’s garbage, is burned in open piles, contributing more emissions than is shown in regional and global inventories.Īn estimated 40 to 50 percent of the garbage is made up of carbon by mass, which means that carbon dioxide is the major gas emitted by trash burning. Or, as Wiedinmyer puts it, “it was my first best guess.” What she came up with was, as the study describes it, “the first comprehensive and consistent estimates of the global emissions of greenhouse gases, particulate matter, reactive trace gases, and toxic compounds from open waste burning.” Along with data from the few studies like Yokelson’s, Wiedinmyer used guidelines for calculating trash burning emissions produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to determine how much waste was being generated and burned, what exactly was in that waste, and what types of chemicals were likely generated. To find that story took a lot of digging around and some educated guesswork. But Wiedinmyer found that, on a global scale, “there wasn’t kind of a consistent story.” Environmental Protection Agency has catalogued emissions from trash burning in the rural areas of the U.S. Yokelson, who is another author of the recent paper, had made some measurements in Mexico of what sort of pollutants were being emitted by trash burning. Working in Indonesia in the 1990s, he said, there was an old man who would come around and gather everyone’s trash, then burn it at the end of the street. “If you do research or travel in developing worlds, you do see garbage burning in a lot of places,” he told Climate Central. Wiedinmyer pored through existing data and inventories and consulted one of the few people already investigating the phenomenon, Bob Yokelson, an atmospheric chemist at the University of Montana in Missoula, who had traveled widely to developing areas and was familiar with the trash burning around homes and villages. The result, detailed in July in the journal Environmental Science & Technology, suggests that burning trash isn’t just bad for human health - it could pump more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than had been realized. Wiedinmyer set out to produce the first global estimates of burn-related pollution. “I was curious to see how big that source was,” she said. Wiedinmyer wondered if this burning waste could be an underappreciated source of air pollutants, from greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide to tiny particles and toxic chemicals that can harm human lungs. Some 40 percent of the world’s waste may be dealt with in this way. So residents and governments often burn piles of their trash in the open removing the garbage from the land but transferring it to the skies. Ghana, Nepal, Mexico and other developing countries often lack the tax bases and infrastructure needed to put such systems into place. We have people who pick up trash and take it away.” “It’s just not something that I’ve been exposed to,” she told Climate Central. Like most residents of developed nations who hadn’t traveled broadly in the developing world, the sight of smoldering rubbish piles, which contain anything from food waste to plastics to electronics, came as a surprise to Wiedinmyer, who works at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. When atmospheric scientist Christine Wiedinmyer first went to Ghana in 2011 to investigate air pollution produced by burning different materials - from crop stubble to coal used in stoves - she noticed an unexpected potential source: burning piles of trash.
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