Data from: A local-to-global emissions inventory of macroplastic pollution

Negotiations for a Global Treaty on plastic pollution will shape future
policies on plastics production, use, and waste management. Its parties
will benefit from a high-resolution baseline of waste flows and plastic
emission sources to enable identification of pollution hotspots and their
causes. Nationally aggregated waste management data can be distributed to
smaller scale to identify generalised points of plastic accumulation and
source phenomena. However, it is challenging to use this type of spatial
allocation to assess the conditions under which emissions take place. To
this, we develop a global macroplastic pollution emissions inventory by
combining conceptual modelling of emission mechanisms with measurable
activity data. We define emissions as materials that have moved from the
managed or mismanaged system (controlled or contained state) to the
unmanaged system (uncontrolled or uncontained state - the environment).
Using machine learning and probabilistic material flow analysis we
identify emission hotspots across 50,702 municipalities worldwide from
five land-based plastic waste emission sources. We estimate global plastic
waste emissions at 52.1 [48.3-56.3] million metric tonnes (Mt) per year,
with approximately 57% wt. and 43% wt. open burned and unburned debris
respectively. Littering is the largest emission source in the Global
North, whereas uncollected waste is the dominant emissions source across
the Global South. We suggest that our findings can help inform Treaty
negotiations and develop national and sub-national waste management action
plans and source inventories.