With the advent of COVID-19, masks have quickly become a staple in society, providing an integral means of protection in the absence of vaccines. However, their ubiquity poses a significant threat to the environment: researchers estimate that every month, 129 billion face masks and 65 billion gloves are used, “resulting in widespread environmental contamination.” Evidently, lots of masks are also ending up in the marine environment—according to a research report conducted by OceansAsia, an organization dedicated to marine conservation, 1.56 billion face masks ended up in the ocean in 2020, the equivalent of “an additional 4,680 to 6,240 metric tonnes of marine plastic pollution.”
OceansAsia’s report indicates that the severity of mask pollution may be due to the troublesome nature of recycling masks. Face masks are composed of a variety of plastics, “which would need to be separated before processed.” In addition, processing and recycling PPE (personal protective equipment) is more expensive than the output recycled products, resulting in little motivation to recycle face masks and “innovate new methods of improving the efficiency of recycling processes and to increase resource recovery.” Furthermore, the safety risk for waste and sanitation workers due to potentially contaminated PPE discourages recycling. Collectively, these challenges translate to high numbers of face masks “allowed to enter general waste systems.”
Gary Stokes, Operations Director for OceansAsia, sheds light on the far-reaching implications of this waste for marine ecosystems: “[p]lastic pollution kills an estimated 100,000 marine mammals and turtles, over a million seabirds, and even greater numbers of fish, invertebrates and other animals each year. It also negatively impacts fisheries and the tourism industry, and costs the global economy an estimated $13 billion USD per year.” Given the detrimental environmental impact, these masks have, especially as “[p]roducts of similar materials to face masks are estimated to take as long as 450 years to fully decompose” with microplastics being generated throughout the breakdown process, OceansAsia’s report advocates for reusable masks instead of single-use plastic masks. When discarding medical (single-use) masks, the World Health Organization (WHO) encourages people to clean their hands and use the straps to throw out the mask in a bin separate from other waste immediately after use or if the mask gets dirty or damp.
Hopefully, properly disposing of masks may help reduce the proliferation of improper waste as, according to Éric Pauget, “[t]he presence of a potentially contaminating virus on the surface of these masks thrown on the ground … represents a serious health threat for public cleaners and children who could accidentally touch them.”
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