Top-5 polluters: WB's false claim
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.
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 i n Env i ronmental 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 DehiwalaMt 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. Per era 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!