Waste: Global Emissions by Country

Why this matters

Waste accounts for a structural slice of the global greenhouse-gas footprint. The top 20 emitters in this sector concentrate 1,409 MtCO₂e in 2023 - most of the policy headroom for action on this sector lives in the same set of countries. Methane dominates the gas mix here, which shapes the abatement tooling that matters most.

According to the EU EDGAR v8.0 dataset published by the European Commission Joint Research Centre in November 2024, global emissions across the major economies exceed 42,000 megatonnes of CO₂-equivalent each year (see our methodology), and this sector is one consistent slice of that total. Comparing the same sector across countries is one of the most useful things emissions data allows, because it isolates a single part of the economy from everything else. Two countries can have similar total emissions yet completely different sector profiles: one dominated by electricity generation, another by transport, agriculture, or heavy industry. Those differences are not cosmetic, they determine which technologies and policies actually reduce emissions. Cutting power-sector emissions means changing how electricity is generated; cutting transport means vehicles and fuels; cutting agricultural emissions means livestock, fertiliser and land management, which behave very differently from fossil-fuel combustion. The greenhouse gases also differ by sector: energy and industry are mostly carbon dioxide, agriculture is mostly methane and nitrous oxide, and waste is mostly methane. Because each gas has a different atmospheric lifetime and warming potential, the gas mix within a sector affects both the near-term and long-term climate impact of acting on it. Every figure on this page is EDGAR's reported value, shown by country, gas and year rather than collapsed into a single sector headline.