Rampant trash burning worldwide is worsening air pollution, releasing more emissions into the atmosphere than previously thought, according to a latest study.

According to a latest study led by National Center for Atmospheric Research, more than 40 percent of the world's garbage is burned in these fires, releasing particles
and gases that can significantly affect climate change and human health.

The new study gives the first estimates, on a country-by-country basis, of pollutants such as carbon monoxide, mercury and particulates that are released by the fires. Moreover, such pollutants have been related to serious medical issues as well.

The researchers also gauged emissions of carbon dioxide, which is the most common greenhouse gas produced by human activity.

The emissions from burning trash in open fires generally go unreported to environmental agencies and are left out of several national inventories of air pollution. This is the reason, they are not integrated into policy making.

Measuring the extent of burning trash might change how policy makers track emissions, and how scientists include air pollution into computer models used to study the atmosphere.

According to NCAR scientist Christine Wiedinmyer, lead author of the new study, as trash burning is unmonitored and unregulated, the actual emissions can be larger or smaller than the study's estimates by a factor of two.

The new study, which has been published in Environmental Science & Technology, was funded by National Science Foundation, which is NCAR's sponsor.

The study was co-authored by scientists from U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and University of Montana, who were involved in assessing the composition of trash-burning emissions.

In order to estimate emissions from trash fires, Wiedinmyer and her co-authors compared per capita waste production and population figures with official tallies of trash disposal for each country in the world.

According to them, 1.1 billion tons, or 41 percent, of the total waste generated worldwide is disposed of through unregulated burning every year.

Moreover, countries that produce the most total waste are heavily populated countries with various levels of industrial development, including U.S., China, India, Germany, Brazil and Japan.

According to the study, the countries with the greatest emissions from trash burning are populous developing countries, including India, China, Mexico, Brazil, Turkey and Pakistan.