Title: Burning Trash Bad for Humans and Global Warming - Scientific American
Headings: Burning Trash Bad for Humans and Global Warming
Burning Trash Bad for Humans and Global Warming
Smoldering garbage turns out to be a significant source of the greenhouse gases causing climate change

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Ghana, Nepal, Mexico and other developing countries often lack the tax bases and infrastructure needed to put such systems into place. 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. 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. Advertisement
“If you do research or travel in developing worlds, you do see garbage burning in a lot of places,” he told Climate Central.