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Data and code for: Washing habits and socioeconomic disparities drive highly unequal global laundry microplastic emissions
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Every time we wash clothes, tiny plastic fibers shed into wastewater—and this study maps out where that pollution is worst around the world, finding that how often people do laundry and where they live (rich vs. poor countries) makes a huge difference in how much plastic ends up in rivers and oceans. This matters because those same waterways supply our drinking water and food chain, so understanding where microplastic pollution concentrates is a first step toward figuring out how to reduce our exposure to it.
This repository contains processed model outputs and scripts supporting the manuscript Washing habits and socioeconomic disparities drive highly unequal global laundry microplastic emissions. The archive includes derived aggregate tables for 2020 emissions, post-wastewater-treatment emissions, basin summaries, future SSP projections, mitigation scenarios, sensitivity analysis and cost calculations; 2020 GeoTIFF raster outputs supporting the spatial baseline; and scripts documenting the data-processing, emission-inventory, wastewater-routing and mitigation-scenario workflow. The data and code support the reported values, spatial patterns, scenario comparisons and mitigation analyses in the manuscript and Supplementary Information. Third-party source datasets should be obtained from their original providers and cited as described in the manuscript and Supplementary Information.
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