Kosovo, Montenegro and Albania are among the top ten countries worldwide where fewest households report separating their household waste, according to a new World Risk Poll report from the Lloyd’s Register Foundation.

“World of Waste: risks and opportunities in household waste management”, published on Tuesday, is based on data collected by global pollster Gallup, which conducted 147,000 interviews in 142 countries and territories around the world.

Poor household waste management causes problems to the environment and risks to human health, the report warns. It says that the ten countries or territories with the highest rates of waste separation are all in Europe or Eastern Asia.

At the other end, seven of the 10 countries where the fewest households report separating their waste are in sub-Saharan Africa. The other three are Kosovo, Montenegro and Albania.

The report says people in these three Balkan countries all face significant challenges in dealing with their domestic waste.

“Kosovo lacks any form of proper waste management for its domestic (or other) refuse. In Montenegro, separation is not effective because recyclable waste is often not sorted post-collection, and people are given no incentives to separate waste at the source. Likewise, in Albania, there are few structures in place to enforce or incentivise separation and recycling, and any separation that is done is mostly informal,” the report says.

Kosovo is ranked third in the list of countries where people do not separate household waste before disposal, beneath Ivory Coast and Gabon. Montenegro and Albania share ninth position on the table, with slightly better results than Togo, Cameroon, Benin, Liberia and the Republic of Congo.

In Kosovo, “lack of knowledge, awareness and education among the general population have hampered progress toward more separation of household waste at the source. More educational and awareness programmes need to be delivered,” the report says.

“Helping households separate their waste more easily and effectively in large parts of Eastern Europe would mean that more households would dispose of their waste in more sustainable (collected and separated) ways,” it notes.

On a global scale, the report finds that more than two in five households globally dispose of their waste in an uncontrolled manner, such as open burning or throwing it in the street, posing great risks to people’s health and the environment.

The Director of Evidence and Insight at Lloyd’s Register Foundation, Nancy Hey, said that dangerous practices such as open burning occur where people do not have any viable alternatives. She called for investment in better collection and processing infrastructure in those countries.

“What type of waste we generate and how we dispose of it matters, impacting air quality and health, the safety of the people who work with our waste, and the environment, particularly if it ends up in our oceans,” Hey said in a statement.