The globe is facing a critical waste disaster resulting from the rapid increase of waste generation and the inability to cope with it in a sustainable manner endangering the environment, climate, and human health. Waste leakage into aquatic environments, along with air pollution and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from open burning and mismanaged waste, has become a major global concern, causing significant harm to land, aquatic ecosystems, air quality, global warming, and human well-being. By contrasting baseline and mitigation scenarios of waste generation, composition and management, our study combines geo-spatial analysis with the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways storylines to develop plausible future waste leakage, air pollutant and GHG emissions mitigation strategies up to 2050.  Our findings demonstrate that sustainability-oriented scenarios, which emphasize circular waste management systems and social transformation, yield earlier and more significant co-benefits compared to technical solutions focused solely on reducing inequalities. Notably, the sustainability-oriented pathway reduces annual GHG emissions to 386 Tg CO2eq (from CH4 and CO2) by 2050 and completely eliminates air pollutants from open burning, showing the potential to eradicate this source of ambient air pollution. 

Despite these advancements, our analysis highlights the challenge of entirely eliminating waste leakage before 2030, even under ideal conditions of widespread public participation, rapid increases in waste collection rates, and adoption of reduce-reuse-recycle strategies. This indicates that achieving the waste-related Sustainable Development Goals will remain a significant challenge without urgent, global, and systemic action.