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: So residents and governments often burn piles of their trash in the open; removing the garbage from the land but transferring it to the skies. Some 40 percent of the world’s waste may be dealt with in this way. RELATED
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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.