Open Burning of Plastic is an Escalating Public Health Threat, Say Experts

In Indonesia, for example, cheap imported plastic is burned as fuel to produce tofu by businesses.

SEATTLE (Scrap Monster): When Tiwonge Mzumara-Gawa was a child, her mother sent her to market with a basket woven from grasses. “But now we don’t do that,” she says, because plastic has taken over most utilitarian purposes in today’s Malawi. “You go and you get a plastic carrier, and they’re usually not reusable plastics.”

In many Malawi communities, and across poorer nations worldwide, there is no waste collection or proper disposal. Instead, families faced with an onslaught of cheap plastic products — including single-use bags, bottles and diapers — commonly burn the waste in pits beside their homes.

With a growing number of developing-world communities living beneath a pall of toxic petrochemical plastic smoke, Mzumara-Gawa is sounding the alarm. Now an ecologist at the Malawi University of Science and Technology and an environmental advocate with the NGO Tearfund, she says the widespread open burning of plastics is taking an increasingly heavy public health and environmental toll that is largely being ignored.

Experts warn that many communities are resorting to the burning of plastic waste in households as fuel, while burning by industry to make energy is also becoming common. Add to this the vast volume of plastic waste dumped by the Global North on the Global South — waste that often ends up being incinerated without pollution controls.

 “Burning plastic is not just a problem for Malawi, but for many developing countries it is a large aspect of their waste management,” Mzumara-Gawa says. “We know it has health implications, and we cannot have that still happening.”

Smoke and the toxins released when plastic is burned vary in their deleterious effects, depending on the type of plastic, but known health impacts can include respiratory and cardiovascular conditions, birth defects and cancers, while the chemical additives plastics contain can affect the endocrine, reproductive and neurological systems.

Now, with U.N. global plastic treaty negotiations set to resume in Geneva, Switzerland, in early August, experts warn that overproduction of plastics and their export from the Global North (as both products and waste) is driving a largely unaddressed planetary environmental health crisis, especially in the Global South.

 Plastic waste spiraling out of control

Open burning of plastic waste is a vastly underestimated problem, says Gauri Pathak, who co-authored a 2024 paper defining open burning as an urgent global health issue. Today, roughly 2 billion people worldwide lack access to waste collection services. With little recourse to rid their communities of toxic-laden plastic waste, the only solution for poorer, underserved neighborhoods is to burn it.

“[A] lot of waste that is burned in the open … is not accounted for,” Pathak says. “What ends up happening is that what can be recycled, and what is economically viable for recycling, will be recycled. But a lot of the other stuff will oftentimes get burned.”

More than 400 million metric tons of plastic is produced annually, an amount expected to soar in coming years. But only a fraction — 10% or less — is ever recycled. Much is dumped into landfills or the general environment, while a large portion is disposed of via poorly controlled incinerators, as household or industrial fuel, or by open burning. According to the U.N. Environment Programme, about 17% of plastic waste globally is incinerated.

 “In the Global North, incineration is a very cheap, and I suppose you could argue, an effective method of disposing of plastic waste. And it’s often used to generate energy,” says Cressida Bowyer, deputy director of the Revolution Plastics Institute at the University of Portsmouth, U.K. “We can burn waste and we can get energy, but actually, it’s dirtier than burning coal.”

A study published in 2024 estimated that around 30 million metric tons of plastic was burned in homes, streets or dumpsites globally in 2020, posing a “substantial” threat to human health. In the wake of that study, critics argued that the paper ignored the impact of “waste colonialism,” the shipping of plastic waste from the Global North to the Global South. This waste is often counted by exporting nations as “recycled” material, but upon arrival in poorer nations, much of it gets burned or dumped into the environment.

After China banned the import of plastic waste in 2018, vast streams of waste flowed from industrialized nations to other Asian countries, including Indonesia, Vietnam and Malaysia. Overwhelmed by a flood of plastic trash, Malaysia banned the import of plastic waste from the United States in July 2025.

The European Union ships around 50% of its plastic waste abroad, much of it heading to Turkey. Once plastic reaches less-developed nations, recycling rates are extremely low. Reports have found that illegal dumping and burning are rife.

A 2024 paper reported masses of imported plastic waste piling up in Minh Khai, Vietnam, supposedly a recycling hub. While a large portion of that plastic trash will eventually be disposed of somewhere in the local environment, some high-quality plastics are melted down into reusable pellets in small makeshift shops, releasing noxious fumes into the atmosphere and polluting surrounding neighborhoods.

 “There are no environmentally safe procedures [in these shops] and you [can] smell the burning plastic in the air,” says Kaustubh Thapa, a researcher at Radboud University in the Netherlands. “People live in this atmosphere of burnt plastic, and wastewater treatment was not a priority. It was just being dumped untreated. But it is a source of livelihood for local people.”

Another common but poorly documented practice is dubbed “refuse-derived fuel” (RDF), where mixed plastics and other waste, known as “fluff,” are fed into cement kilns and burned in a highly polluting energy strategy. IPEN, an NGO dedicated to a toxics-free future, has tracked this issue, and found it to be a widespread way of circumventing plastic waste trade bans.

“The [plastic waste] trade is going on … But the destinations, the volumes and the movements from north to south or otherwise, are very difficult to monitor, because of the problems with tracking,” Thapa says. “What we’re seeing is … limited international trade occurring, but that there’s massive development on the ground in most countries of RDF. Every country that we’ve investigated is beginning, or is well into its journey, [of] developing domestic RDF activity.”

In Indonesia, for example, cheap imported plastic is burned as fuel to produce tofu by businesses. Haryani Saptaningtyas, a lecturer at Sebelas Maret University, says plastic is also burned to provide energy by Indonesia’s limestone industry. “In the past, they used wood, but currently they use plastic because it is cheaper.”

That’s a significant cause for concern, says Lee Bell, an IPEN technical and policy adviser, as these energy units are not equipped to control the noxious emissions and contaminants.

“There [are] levels of problems associated with exporting plastic waste and how it’s managed,” Bell says. “The worst-case scenario tends to be open burning. The next worst is this informal burning for industrial purposes. The next worst then becomes things like cement kilns and incinerators.”

 Courtesy: www.mongabay.com