The U.S. generates 12 percent of global municipal waste—three times the global average—but only accounts for 4 percent of the world’s population, reads the report, which was produced by Verisk Maplecroft, a United Kingdom-based research firm and consultancy specializing in global risk data and country risk analysis.
Of the staggering volumes of junk the country that created globalized consumer goods brand names such as Starbucks, McDonald’s and Coca-Cola, as well as the Black Friday sales, produces, only 35 percent are adequately recycled, the study shows. The research indicates that at 773kg per head, American citizens produce over three times as much waste as their Chinese counterparts, while municipal waste generation per capita is four times higher in the United States than in India.
But the US is not the only country that is bad at managing waste. While better than America at recycling, other industrialized countries, including the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands and Australia, are also disproportionately responsible for waste generation, the study shows.
Asia, often made the scapegoat for the world’s plastic crisis, has undoubtedly contributed to marine plastic pollution, but such criticism has neglected the fact that Asian nations have traditionally served as the world’s trash dumps, with industrialized countries shipping their waste to the region for recycling to prevent their homelands from getting swamped by the goods they discard.
According to the report, plastic waste flows have been directed at developing nations that tend to lack the resources to recycle adequately. What’s worse, such deliveries have often contained a mixture of various waste types, which make adequate recycling difficult if not impossible.
But, the study shows, this era is coming to an end. As waste importing countries, including Thailand, Vietnam and Malaysia, are moving to limit the material they accept or ban it outright following China’s foreign waste ban 18 months ago, industrialised nations must find ways to reduce the rate at which they devour resources and deal with their own plastic waste rather than dumping it in the developing world.
Only recently, more than 100 containers of waste mislabelled as recyclable plastics Canada had shipped to the Philippines in 2013 and 2014 sparked a dispute between the two countries. It took threats of armed conflict from the Philippine government to pressure Canada to repatriate its waste in May this year.