What would you do if your waste was not promptly collected in your area?

One day passes, and it starts to smell. One week passes, and it begins attracting pests and stray animals. When the rain comes, it blocks the drains and spreads disease. You cannot keep storing it indefinitely. You cannot simply ignore it.

So, what would you do?

For millions of people around the world, this is not a hypothetical question. It is a daily reality they face, and with all the limitations of the system around them, the easiest answer is to burn it.

Make the waste disappear

In many communities, burning waste is a daily routine, as ordinary as cooking or sweeping the front porch. Around 2.7 billion people in the world have no waste collection service at all.  When there is no bin to fill, when no trash truck comes, when there is no system ready to take the problem away, waste piles up quickly – and that pile brings its own very real, very urgent consequences: rotting food, insects, blocked drains, the spread of disease. Burning solves those problems quickly, at least on the surface. This is not careless behaviour or ignorance. It is the reality of having to choose the least bad option from a very short list.

A global problem 

Open burning is not limited to one region or one type of community. It is a global response to a global problem: too much plastic, most of it single-use, with no plan for where it ends up.

According to the Lloyd’s Register Foundation 2024 World Risk Poll, open burning is most widespread in Eastern Africa, where 41% of households use it as their primary method of waste disposal, followed by Central and Western Africa at 34%, and South-East Asia at 32%. In Indonesia, the number sits even higher than all of these regional averages, with 48% of households reported to burn their waste, despite open burning being prohibited by law.  In rural communities across Nigeria, Kenya, Ethiopia, Ghana, Nepal, and Thailand, open burning is documented as a common household practice. In rural Thailand alone, more than half of all household waste is burned. 

It also happens in places we would not expect. Open burning has been documented in Hungary, South Korea, and the United States, a reminder that this is not simply a problem of developing nations. In fact, the wealthiest countries in the world have not solved this problem either – they have largely exported it. High-income countries including Germany, the UK, the Netherlands, France, the US, Japan, and Australia have for years been shipping plastic waste abroad under the claim that it will be recycled. In 2023, Germany was the world’s largest plastic waste exporter at over 693,000 metric tons, with the UK close behind at around 615,000 metric tons. Much of that waste ends up in countries that lack the infrastructure to process it safely, where it is dumped or burned at the household and community level. Enforcement of regulations remains a major problem, with many waste exporters taking advantage of inadequate monitoring and poor border controls. The countries producing the most plastic have the least interest in dealing with where it ends up. 

What actually happens when waste is burned

Photo credit: Abhinay Tharu/Unsplash

Burning waste does not make it disappear. It just makes it less visible, and out of sight is not the same thing as gone. 

Burning waste, especially plastic, releases a toxic mix of pollutants into the air and into the soil through ash: heavy metals, styrene gas, dioxins and furans, chemicals that persist in the body and in the environment long after the fire goes out. A 2014 study published in Environmental Science & Technology found that open burning of household waste is one of the largest global sources of certain hazardous air pollutants, including polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and fine particles.

That last point is worth paying attention to. Fine particles known as PM2.5 are small enough to pass through the nose and throat and travel deep into the lungs and bloodstream. The WHO classifies outdoor air pollution, of which open burning is a significant contributor, as a leading environmental cause of death globally, responsible for around 3.2 million premature deaths every year.

The health impact, in numbers

The health data on open burning is difficult to read, and even harder to ignore.

One study estimated that open burning of waste is linked to between 270,000 and 920,000 deaths per year globally. Beyond that, open burning of plastics is linked to increased risks of heart disease and neurological disorders, while emissions including dioxins have been connected to skin lesions, cancer, immunological issues, and birth defects. 

Sadly, this burden is not shared equally. The elderly, pregnant women, and children are among the most vulnerable. So too are the people tending the fires, and the neighbours living downwind. Harm also enters through the food chain: when toxins from burning settle into soil and water, they make their way into locally grown food and into the bodies of people who never stood near a fire at all.

The exposure does not look dramatic, but it keeps happening.

This is not large-scale burning as seen in factories or industrial incinerators. There is no towering smokestack, no warning sign, no obvious signal that something harmful is happening. There are only small fires, burning close to where people sleep, eat, and play, repeated every day, familiar enough to feel normal – and that familiarity is precisely what makes it so dangerous.

This gap is not simply a story of missing lorries and underfunded councils. It is the direct result of a production system that keeps making more plastic than the world can handle, and concentrating the consequences in the places with the least power to push back. At least 2 billion people worldwide have no access to any waste collection, treatment, or disposal services. For these communities, burning is not a choice. It is an inheritance. 

The packaging problem makes everything worse. For most of human history, there was no need for large-scale waste collection. Most waste was organic, and what could be reused, reused. But single-use plastic packaging flooded markets far faster than any infrastructure could keep up, especially in island communities and rural areas where collection systems are expensive to build and even more expensive to maintain. Global municipal waste generation is projected to grow from 2.3 billion tonnes in 2023 to 3.8 billion tonnes by 2050, almost all of it driven by packaging and single-use materials landing in places that have no system in place to receive them.

And the companies that make that packaging? They have known about the problem they cause for a long time, but the burden of dealing with it has been consistently shifted, first onto public bodies, then onto households: manage it yourselves, find a way to make it disappear. 

What can help, for now

There are small changes that can reduce the harm while the larger system gets its act together. Separating organic waste for composting and keeping plastic out of the fire entirely, significantly lowers exposure to dioxins, furans, and heavy metals.

This is not a complete solution, but it is not nothing either. Reducing the most toxic emissions is one small, real part of addressing the harm, even if it cannot address the system that causes it. For someone standing in front of a pile of waste with no bin to fill and no trash trucks coming, it is worth knowing. 

The bigger picture

People who burn waste are not choosing pollution. They are not choosing to harm their neighbours, their children, or themselves. They are trapped in a system that was never built for them, one that was flooded with cheap plastic packaging without any consideration of its safety, or the infrastructure available to handle it.

Waste should not be managed at the point of burning. It should be prevented at the point of design. Better collection systems can ease the immediate harm, but they are a temporary fix to a permanent flow. The only real answer is less plastic being made in the first place, and producers being held accountable for every piece they release into the world. 

Until products and systems change, the harm will keep being pushed onto the people with the fewest choices, and they have already been carrying it long enough.

We often talk about plastic pollution as if it is only an environmental problem – or a waste problem, something that only matters at the end of a product’s life. Uncollected or poorly managed waste contaminates air, soil, and water sources. Plastic waste, small and large, is found in the bodies of sea turtles and various marine animals. At its core, all of these are real and urgent problems, but sometimes we forget that there is another story that is far closer than other plastic problems, which is the problem of waste that silently lives inside our bodies.

Every day, our bodies are exposed to tens of thousands of petrochemicals – synthetic chemicals derived from petroleum and gas that are used to make plastics, packaging, cosmetics, cleaning products, and more. We encounter them through the products we use, the food we eat, and the air we breathe. This applies to everyone, but unfortunately, the impact is not the same for everyone.

The fact is, women’s bodies process these chemicals differently. Women tend to have thinner skin, so chemicals found in products that come into contact with their skin are more easily absorbed. Women also have a higher percentage of body fat, so more fat-soluble plastic chemicals such as phthalates and BPA, end up absorbed and stored inside their bodies. Women also typically have smaller than average body sizes, causing the concentration of those chemicals to be higher. And a slower metabolism means women’s bodies take longer to eliminate them.

These facts are not merely biological footnotes we can ignore because they sound too ordinary. They must change how we think about who bears the real cost of the plastic crisis.

The body stores everything we experience

Plastic is full of endocrine-disrupting chemicals – substances that interfere with our hormones.  For women, whose health is so closely tied to hormonal balance throughout their lives, this disruption can be deeply damaging.

During puberty, pregnancy, and perimenopause, women’s bodies are in a state of change, meaning even the smallest toxic exposure during these important moments not only adds risk but also multiplies its effects. These chemicals are linked to fertility problems, certain cancers, and diabetes. They can ultimately also trigger early menopause and worsen symptoms like hot flashes and mood swings.

Sadly, this impact does not stop at one generation. Women unknowingly pass toxins from their bodies to their children during pregnancy and breastfeeding: a journey that women always remember in their lives becoming a silent transfer of toxins, even before their babies breathe air outside the womb.

Home is no longer a safe place

Traditional domestic roles place women in closer and more frequent contact with chemicals found in various household necessities such as cleaning products, packaging, synthetic rubber gloves that are ironically sold as “protection” – but actually become a new source of exposure.

Plastic chemicals are used in product formulas to create fragrance, colour, texture, and longer shelf life and are rarely tested for safety before reaching our hands.

Then there is the beauty sector. Marketing pressure deliberately targets women, endlessly pushing them to buy cosmetics, personal care products, fragrances, and hygiene products that almost all contain petrochemicals and are packaged in plastic. Even the most basic hygiene products are not spared from this danger: most sanitary pads and tampons that are affordable and easily accessible to the general public actually contain plastic that is harmful to their bodies.

More than 16,000 chemicals have been identified in plastic, and most of these substances have never been tested for safety regarding direct and indirect exposure for humans, more specifically, women. Of those, a quarter are already known to be hazardous but only 6% are regulated. The rest? No one is checking.

With no strong regulation or clear labeling of ingredients on products and packaging, there is no obvious way for women to know or understand the risks involved in their daily routines.

The health costs of earning a living

Photo credit: Mumtahina Tanni

Women are the dominant workforce in industries with high chemical exposure: cleaning, waste management, textiles, agriculture. Many of these jobs are informal in nature which means they  have no regulations to ensure workers’ health and safety.

These jobs most often come without adequate personal protective equipment, are not covered by occupational health services, without sick leave, and without information about the risks they can and will face. Long working hours mean continuous and intense exposure to various toxins. These kinds of jobs are also usually low-paying, leaving workers with little power to change the situation.  

Globally, the majority of waste pickers working at open dumpsites are women. WECF reports that many of them cannot live past the age of 30, and this is not a statistic from an era that has passed: it is still happening today.

Same plastic, unequal impact

Photo credit: MART Production

The plastic crisis does not discriminate in who it touches, but sadly it is very selective in how hard it hits.

Women bear a disproportionate chemical burden – through their biological body systems, the domestic roles they carry, the working conditions they must face, and the non-essential products they are told they need. With this many negative effects, women are still too rarely part of the conversations that decide what is produced, what is regulated, and what is labeled.

To change this, we need more legal protections for high-risk workers. We need honest product labeling. We need health and safety standards that actually apply to informal workers. And we need more women in the rooms where decisions and regulations about chemicals and production are made.

The plastic crisis is a women’s health crisis, it always has been. The question is, how much longer will we pretend otherwise?