Coronavirus waste is killing nature. The trend, which I had mentioned with tragic foresight in this column on August 16 of last year (“Swimming with SARS-CoV-2”), was based on early scientific evidence; unfortunately, it has been confirmed and… is growing exponentially.
It is now evident that we are facing new—pandemic-induced—dimensions of an old problem. The destruction of wildlife by the plastic components of personal protective equipment against the coronavirus, which end up being indiscriminately dumped in massive quantities into the environment. Face masks, plastic gloves, and other items in oceans, rivers, canals, coastlines, and even cities, are destroying ecosystems, as their micro- and nanoplastic components have a lifespan of hundreds of years.
Due to the pandemic, 129 billion face masks are used worldwide every month—3 million per minute!—most of them disposable, made with plastic microfibers and rubber bands. Last year, 1.56 billion of these ended up in the oceans, according to a study by the organization OceansAsia titled “Masks on the Shore: The Impact of COVID-19 on Marine Plastic Pollution.” It will take 450 years for their effects to disappear, as they will gradually break down into microplastics, negatively impacting marine life and ecosystems…
These consequences do not affect only the depths of the oceans or the coastlines, but also urban environments. A recent study by scientists at the Naturalis Biodiversity Center and the Institute of Biology at Leiden University in the Netherlands, published in the scientific journal “Animal Biology,” documents some of these.
The “Impact of COVID-19 Waste on Wildlife” study was prompted by the discovery of a perch trapped in a plastic glove while cleaning a canal in Leiden. Scientists found that birds use COVID-19 waste to build their nests; seagulls were found with disposable masks wrapped around their legs for weeks, while other birds were unable to remove the masks from their beaks and claws.
And they aren’t the only ones. Hedgehogs, crabs, pufferfish, bats, and others have been found inside masks and gloves—some alive and injured, others dead. Sometimes animals eat the plastic, like a penguin that was found dead on a beach in Brazil because it had swallowed a mask. But the consequences aren’t limited to wildlife. Cats and dogs make the same mistake. And so do people.
“A six-year-old child swallowed pieces of a face mask that had accidentally been mixed in with chicken nuggets” at a fast-food chain restaurant, the researchers write. “People are suffering greatly from the pandemic, but nature can no longer tolerate our plastics,” the scientists note, urging citizens to cut up so that animals won’t get trapped in them in the future.
The issue of the specialized management of this waste is also the focus of other studies, such as that by Elvis Genbo Xu, a biologist in the Department of Biology at the University of Southern Denmark, and his colleague Zhiyong Jason Ren at Princeton University, titled “Preventing Masks from Becoming the Next Plastic Problem.”.
They emphasize the need for “the environmental research community to act quickly to understand and mitigate the risks” through regulation, reuse, and replacement of single-use masks, based on interdisciplinary research and coordinated efforts by environmentalists, medical organizations, waste management agencies, and the public. “To reduce the negative impacts of single-use masks and prevent them from becoming yet another massive problem to manage.”.
Rena Dourou
