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The world creates 57 million tons of plastic pollution every year and spreads it from the deepest oceans to the highest mountaintops to the inside of people’s bodies, according to a new study that also said more than two-thirds of it comes from the Global South.
It’s enough pollution each year — about 52 million metric tons — to fill New York City’s Central Park with plastic waste as high as the Empire State Building, according to researchers at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom. They examined waste produced on the local level at more than 50,000 cities and towns across the world for a study in Wednesday’s journal Nature.
The study examined plastic that goes into the open environment, not plastic that goes into landfills or is properly burned. For 15 percent of the world’s population, the government fails to collect and dispose of waste, the study’s authors said — a big reason Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa produce the most plastic waste. That includes 255 million people in India, the study said.
Lagos, Nigeria, emitted the most plastic pollution of any city, according to study author Costas Velis, a Leeds environmental engineering professor. The other biggest plastic-polluting cities are New Delhi; Luanda, Angola; Karachi, Pakistan; and Al Qahirah, Egypt.
India leads the world in generating plastic pollution, producing 10.2 million tons a year (9.3 million metric tons), far more than double the next big-polluting nations, Nigeria, and Indonesia. China, often villainized for pollution, ranks fourth but is making tremendous strides in reducing waste, Velis said. Other top plastic polluters are Pakistan, Bangladesh, Russia, and Brazil. Those eight nations are responsible for more than half of the globe’s plastic pollution, according to the study’s data.
The United States ranks 90th in plastic pollution with more than 52,500 tons (47,600 metric tons) and the United Kingdom ranks 135th with nearly 5,100 tons (4,600 metric tons), according to the study.
