Erick C. Jones Jr., PhD, PE

Projects · Critical Minerals and Supply Chains

Waste Analysis: Where the World's Trash Goes, and Where Nobody Knows

Tracing municipal solid waste from region to material to fate with World Bank data, and testing whether the gaps in countries' waste records follow their level of development.

Sankey diagram titled 'Where municipal solid waste goes, by country income group (2,335 million tonnes a year, projected to 2022)'. Four income groups on the left (high income 741 Mt, upper-middle 949 Mt, lower-middle 563 Mt, low income 81 Mt) flow to seven fates on the right: recycled, composted or recovered 1,039 Mt; controlled landfill 524 Mt; landfill, standard not recorded 228 Mt; open dump or uncontrolled 94 Mt; not collected 157 Mt; fate unknown 140 Mt; no treatment data 152 Mt. High- and upper-middle-income waste flows mostly to recycling and controlled landfill; lower-middle- and low-income waste flows heavily to not collected, fate unknown and no treatment data.
Where the world's municipal solid waste goes, by country income group. The grey flows on the right are waste whose fate is not recorded.Drawn by the SEAR Lab from the World Bank's What a Waste 3.0 country dataset (2026), CC BY 4.0

In plain English

Every country produces trash, but not every country records what happens to it. Using the World Bank's What a Waste country data for 217 countries, students built a pipeline that converts each country's waste composition and treatment shares into tonnages and draws them as flows from region to material to fate: recycled, composted, burned, landfilled or dumped. The world generates more than two billion tonnes of municipal solid waste a year, and food is the largest single material.

In 2026 the lab rebuilt the analysis as reproducible code that runs on both the 2018 edition of the data and the new 2026 one, and turned to a sharper question: where is a country's waste unaccounted for, and why? The early answer, tested against hypotheses fixed in advance, is that gaps in waste records track a country's level of development more than its general statistical capacity. The gaps are shrinking mostly because waste once recorded as "unknown" is now recorded as uncollected, or as landfilled to an unrecorded standard, rather than because more of it is well managed. That analysis is being written up and has not been published.

Main points

  • Converts World Bank country data into regional flows of material and treatment.
  • Reproducible: the students' original pipeline re-runs exactly, and the maintained version handles both editions of the data.
  • Tests, with hypotheses fixed in advance, whether gaps in waste records follow development or statistical capacity.
  • Next: figures, and a paper on the 2026 data.

Papers, code and materials

People

  • Erick C. Jones Jr., PhD, PEPrincipal Investigator · SEAR Lab directorin
  • Pradeepa ChakkaravarthyStudent researcher (2026): pipeline and draft
  • Hritik PatilStudent researcher (2026): pipeline and draftin

Also contributed: Kankshita Siddhabathuni and Lokesh Ram Hariram (2026). Profiles marked in link to LinkedIn. More past and present lab members are on the SEAR Lab team page.

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