Title: For Air Pollution, Trash Is a Burning Problem | Climate Central
Headings: For Air Pollution, Trash Is a Burning Problem
For Air Pollution, Trash Is a Burning Problem
‘First Best Guess’
What’s in the Emissions
Just a Starting Point

Content: Rising Global Temperatures & CO2
Wiedinmyer wondered if this burning waste could be an underappreciated source of air pollutants, from greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide to tiny particles and toxic chemicals that can harm human lungs. “I was curious to see how big that source was,” she said. Wiedinmyer set out to produce the first global estimates of burn-related pollution. The result, detailed in July in the journal Environmental Science & Technology, suggests that burning trash isn’t just bad for human health—it could pump more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than had been realized. ‘First Best Guess’
Wiedinmyer pored through existing data and inventories and consulted one of the few people already investigating the phenomenon, Bob Yokelson, an atmospheric chemist at the University of Montana in Missoula, who had traveled widely to developing areas and was familiar with the trash burning around homes and villages. “If you do research or travel in developing worlds, you do see garbage burning in a lot of places,” he told Climate Central. Working in Indonesia in the 1990s, he said, there was an old man who would come around and gather everyone’s trash, then burn it at the end of the street. Yokelson, who is another author of the recent paper, had made some measurements in Mexico of what sort of pollutants were being emitted by trash burning. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has catalogued emissions from trash burning in the rural areas of the U.S. But Wiedinmyer found that, on a global scale, “there wasn’t kind of a consistent story.” To find that story took a lot of digging around and some educated guesswork.