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Sri Lanka erroneously shamed as top-5 polythene polluters by WB in 2012; error remains uncorrected
Sri Lanka is still haunted by an old erroneous and unsubstantiated World Bank statistic that caused it to be labelled the fifth worst plastic polluter of the seas.
Six years ago, Science Magazine–one of the world’s two top peer-reviewed journals –published an article by eight academics about plastic waste pollution of the ocean.
Based on data from a 2012 World Bank (WB) report, the team inferred that Sri Lanka was the fifth largest polluter of seas, behind only China, Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam. They said Sri Lanka generated 5.1kg of waste per person per day; that 1.59 million metric tonnes of this is mismanaged plastic waste; and that it dumps between 0.24 and 0.64 million metric tonnes of plastic into the sea each year.
If none of this sounds right, it’s because it was not. In July 2017, the Sunday Times—after an exhaustive investigation that went to the root of the data—found that the team’s implausible conclusion was based on an unsourced and unverifiable statistic contained in the 2012 ‘What a Waste’ (WaW) report.
True, there is maritime pollution in Sri Lanka but certainly not on the scale of 5.1 kgs per person per day as claimed by the World Bank report. Pic by M. A. Pushpa Kumara
The WaW had no reference for its calculation and did not divulge how it was arrived at. On this newspaper’s digging, the WB also confirmed there was an error in the waste generation number.
The team that produced the paper published in the Science Magazine was led by Jenna Jambeck, now Georgia Athletic Association Distinguished Professor in Environmental Engineering. She said this week that the reference they used “was never updated nor changed nor corrected” by the WB.
“In discussion with co-authors, without a correction of the reference, we cannot document a correction so unsure how we’d change anything,” she told the Sunday Times via email. The data were reported to the WB from the Government, published by them and referenced, she also said. But, as the Sunday Times conclusively found in 2017, this was not the case.
In October 2019, Susiri Costa, a lecturer at the Moratuwa University’s Department of Chemical and Process Engineering, also challenged the popular narrative which, by then, was deeply entrenched in local and international public discourse.
Sri Lanka’s coastline, he pointed out, was 1,340km. Its coastal population was 14.6mn—or 0.72 percent of the global coastal population. According to Science Magazine, however, it was responsible for an entire five percent of ocean plastic pollution in the world.
India, with a coastal line of 7,517km and coastal population of 187.5mn (9.27 percent of the global coastal population) was deemed responsible for just 1.9 percent of the world’s ocean plastic pollution. Mr Costa concluded after analysis that the country was a “victim of inappropriate data and assumptions” that had caused it to end up in the top five global ocean polluters list.
Mr Costa definitively faulted the WB data. If they had taken the waste generation per capita per day directly from local sources, he said, “There has to be a significant error in the local source”. And if they had taken the total amount of waste generation per day from a local source, there also had to be either a data error in the source or calculation error by the WB.
The WB report had not explicitly mentioned its source. This is correct. The Sunday Times only obtained this information by questioning the WB which contacted one of the 2012 WaW authors who provided the original source paper—Perera, 2003. She could not say how they got the number of 5.1kg/person/day and noted that that the amount disposed stated in Perera is 1,500 tons/day “for Colombo only”.
The 2012 WaW also depended on a 2009 report from the UN Statistics Division which captured waste generation figures from Dehiwala-Mt Lavinia and Moratuwa. The former is 0.73 kg per person, per day and the latter is 0.67 kg per person, per day. There is no national level information cited.
The second source is ‘An Overview of the Issue of Solid Waste Management in Sri Lanka’ authored by K. L. S. Perera for the 2003 Third International Conference on Environment and Health. We accessed it online and, in 2017, also interviewed Mr. Perera, a retired Senior Lecturer at the Siyane National College of Education in Veyangoda.
While this paper states that Colombo faces a “severe crisis with respect to the disposal of around 1,500 tons of solid waste material per day”, it makes no reference to 5.1kg per person, per day.
But Prof Jambeck’s assertion that the WB didn’t update its original information is incorrect. In 2018, there was a new report called ‘What a Waste 2.0: A Global Snapshot of Solid Waste Management to 2050’. This placed Sri Lanka’s waste per person per day at 0.34kg, which is oceans apart from the 2012 unsupported statistic of 5.1kg/person/day. (Mr Costa, however, feels it should be more than that).
Both the 2012 WaW report and Science Magazine have been cited thousands of times. Prof Jambeck pointed out that new papers have now been published—including one on which she is an author—with more recent data and references and should be used by now.
In Sri Lanka’s case, they are not. Not even in-country, where common sense should at least prompt people to question this tale.
But another scientist who did challenge the narrative is Ajith de Alwis, Professor of Chemical and Process Engineering at Moratuwa University. In an article last year, he asserted that the peer reviewers of the Science Magazine article, perhaps more the authors themselves, should have seriously realised that a figure of 5.1 kg of waste generation per person per day (in a population of 21mn) “must not be quite right”.
Not only would this make Sri Lanka the first worst marine polluter, he said, it meant the country held a world record for per person waste generation!
That label that won’t go away In early December last year, Sarath Wijesinghe, Managing Director of Aqua Packaging (Pvt) Ltd, contacted this newspaper. Along with two sister companies, his business produces plastic bags for export to the US and Europe. One of the products that go to the US is the newspaper bag. Folded newspapers are inserted into them before delivery. Aqua Packaging is one of the major exporters of the newspaper bag with an average monthly volume of around 400 metric tonnes or about 220 million bags. Recently, however, an American competitor had sponsored an advertisement that depicted Sri Lanka as being among the worst ocean polluters in the world. It used the five-country list of offenders first compiled by Science Magazine and showed Sri Lanka’s annual contribution towards ocean pollution to be 640,000 metric tons of plastic waste. “This number is completely inaccurate,” Mr Wijesighe protested. Sri Lanka does not have plastic manufacturing capability and all plastic raw materials are imported. At least 25% of locally-made products are recycled. The approximate annual imports of all types of plastic raw material falling under the HS code 39 is below 450,000MT (based on 2019 Customs import data). Some of these are used in the paint industry. “It is my opinion that only around 200,000MT of plastic resin is used for manufacturing single application products. At least 20,000MT of this gets exported directly as finished products. Another 25,000MT or so gets exported indirectly as garment bags, grow bags, packaging in fishery products etc. There are a few other forms of finished plastic products coming in as packaging and wrapping but there is no way 640,000MT of plastic waste ending up in oceans, he said. “I hope we can get the inaccuracies of data circulating among international bodies such as the World Bank and the UN can be corrected,” he said. The Sunday Times did find at least one international publication that referred to the Jambeck et al research paper and attempted to set the record straight. A 2016 report titled ‘Stemming the Tide: Land-based strategies for a plastic-free ocean’ by a Washington-based nonprofit environmental advocacy group called Ocean Conservancy had its own list of top offenders. It replaced Sri Lanka at number five with Thailand, saying they have research to suggest the majority of plastic enters the ocean from a small geographic area, and that over half comes from just five rapidly growing economies—China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam. And in its footnotes it refers to research paper in Science Magazine, clarifying that the list was modified to substitute Thailand for Sri Lanka. Why? Because their methodology suggested that Sri Lanka contributed “a lower quantity of ocean plastic than that originally reported”. “Further, the methodological adjustments made to Sri Lanka, if applied to India, imply that India would likely rise to be a top-five source for ocean plastic-waste leakage,” it held. | |