PPE Pollution: The Pandemic’s Enduring Legacy

The masks are everywhere.

Literally.

They’re in hospitals (and parking lots), homes (and driveways), schools (and sidewalks), airports (and terminals), parks (and riverbanks), on beaches (and in oceans), on buses (and seats), in supermarkets (and aisles), and theaters (and floors).

“It’s quite alarming where these are ending up,” Gary Stokes, founder of marine conservation group OceansAsia, told The New York Times during the pandemic’s early days. “It’s not just the beaches. We’re getting them out in nature, but also downtown; you see them on the streets, in the gutter, on public transport.”

Basically, anywhere a mask has been worn.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been both a boon and bane for Earth’s already fragile landscape, reducing humans’ carbon and noise footprints, and improving wildlife longevity (albeit briefly) yet simultaneously turning the planet into a PPE wasteland.

PPE (personal protective equipment) demand exploded in early spring 2020 as the public sought protection from the fast-spreading, deadly coronavirus. Lockdowns and supply chain snafus stymied initial PPE production but cross-industry partnerships and community-based efforts eventually helped manufacturers quench the world’s thirst for protective equipment.

It was quite a considerable thirst, too: Between March 2020 and November 2021, manufacturers (large and small) produced 87,000 tons of PPE—enough to fill 261,747 jumbo jets, according to World Health Organization (WHO) data.

Such a gargantuan yield beget an equally colossal amount of refuse—4.5 trillion discarded masks (an estimated 3.4 billion per day), and 65 billion single-use latex gloves—much of which wound up in landfills or as litter. An estimated 1.6 billion of all those cast-off masks wound up in planet’s oceans in 2020, according to Visual Capitalist researchers, creating a plastic heap roughly 7% the size of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

A COVID-19 momento, of sorts, for posterity.

“The COVID-19 pandemic has led to an increased demand for single-use plastics that intensifies pressure on an already out-of-control global plastic waste problem,” American and Chinese scientists concluded in a research article last fall. “We find a long-lasting impact of the pandemic-associated waste release in the global ocean. At the end of this century, [our] model suggests that almost all the pandemic-associated plastics end up in either the seabed (28.8%) or beaches (70.5%), potentially hurting the benthic ecosystems. This poses a long-lasting problem for the ocean environment…”

And terra firma as well. All those trashed facemasks dirtying parking lots, curbsides, parks, fields, and mountains can still carry traces of coronavirus, perpetuating existing outbreaks or possibly spawning new ones. The masks also release polypropylene nanofibers into soil upon decomposition, which can stunt the growth and lifecycles of both earthworms and springtails, and contaminate the ground with volatile organic compounds like benzene and propanal.

Such poisons only add to the toxic stew already brewing at the world’s landfills.

Those toxins also make recycling an impractical option.

“…we can no longer afford to ignore the impact on the environment,” Maggie Montgomery, Ph.D., technical officer at the World Health Organization, warned in a January 2022 podcast. “The good news is it’s possible to prevent and protect against COVID-19 and the environment…”

Possible and highly probable: Researchers and foresighted entrepreneurs have already devised some dual-purpose solutions for ending PPE pollution. MIT researchers, for example, are examining ways to decontaminate and reuse N95 masks (using silicone material), while Cornell University engineers have developed a process to turn used masks and other protective equipment into chemicals and petroleum.

Mexican chemical engineering student Tamara Chayo, meanwhile, has invented durable wash-and-wear PPE. Able to withstand 50 laundry cycles without losing its protective properties, the equipment is embedded with QR technology that tracks the number of times an item has been worn (via a smart phone app). After 50 wear cycles, the PPE is disinfected and converted into cotton scrubs and bags for packaging.

Concurrently, staff at the Royal Cornwall Hospital in Truro, England, are working with Thermal Compaction Group (TCG), a Welsh environmental organization, to turn used masks and hospital gowns into big blocks that eventually are converted into new products like bottles, bins, and toolboxes.

Entrepreneur Binish Desai—a.k.a., “The Recycle Man of India”—has created a similar building block, inventing a new brick made from disinfected and shredded masks and other PPE mixed with paper mill waste and binder. The 28-year-old claims the grey bricks are three times stronger than earth bricks, twice the size, and nearly half the cost, and can be used to build low-cost housing and schools.

Desai’s brick-making talents date back to his teenage years. He founded Eco-Eclectic Technologies in 2016 and is working to export his bricks to Brazil, where he eventually hopes to build a waste processing plant.

“Attitudes are changing,” he told a Thomson Reuters Foundation News reporter last summer. “The pandemic has made us far more aware of how much waste we’re generating and that it’s not sustainable.”