Uncollected waste and open burning are leading causes of the plastic pollution crisis. That's the conclusion of research at the University of Leeds based on a new global plastics pollution inventory.

Each year, more than 400 million tonnes of plastic are produced. Many of these products are single-use and hard to recycle, and can stay in the environment for decades or centuries, often being fragmented into microplastics.

Once these single-use plastics have been used, what happens to them? To find out, researchers at the University of Leeds used AI to model waste management in more than 50,000 municipalities around the world.

The results reveal that 52 million tonnes of plastic products entered the environment in 2020. Two-thirds of this plastic pollution comes from uncollected rubbish, with almost 1.2 billion people – 15% of the global population – living without access to waste collection services.

This is especially prevalent in low and middle-income countries in the Global South...