New Menace-Masked Pollution
September 1, 2021
Do masks protect us or are these just another source of infection? Does the ‘New Normal’ pose a ‘New Menace’? At the height of the pandemic, masks have become renowned armament in the fight against COVID-19. As people have accustomed to the new normal, there has been an upsurge in the demand for face masks in the world. As per the estimation, the world uses face masks 129 billion per month, 3 million a minute. The materials ordinarily used to make the disposable mask are polypropylene (a form of plastic) and rubber. While polypropylene takes up nearly 20-30 years to decompose, rubber takes as much as 50 years to completely elude its existence. Plastic, once, enters the environment, can take hundreds or even thousands of years to decompose. We also know that in certain conditions, the virus can survive on a plastic surgical mask for seven days. Disposable masks should be treated as hazardous waste, as they are of single-use and can spread the infection.
How abandoned face masks are affecting health and the environment?
As said by, public health experts that improperly discarded masks could be latent sources of the virus if people come into contact with them. Also, an environmental catastrophe seems to be looming in this regard. Certain that surgical masks are supposed to be worn for no longer than one day, their disposal is leading to a colossal trail of clinical waste in the environment. Many of these face masks are littered across valuable natural resources such as rivers, beaches and oceans, causing harm to flora and fauna. Be it land or water, once these are left discarded in natural locale, this may cause animals to mistake this trash for food, which could lead to entanglement, choking, ingestion and death.
Certain sections of the population are at risk of adverse impacts from exposure to medical waste (discarded masks) such as waste collectors, cleaners, litter pickers and other people who spend a great deal of time in public areas. The frontline workers whose work are of keeping cities hygienic have to go out to earn their daily wage, making them one of the most exposed groups who are susceptible to the virus from droplets that may linger on the masks. There is also a chance that they may catch other kinds of infection from pathogens remaining on these discarded pieces of masks, such as meningitis and Hepatitis B and C.
What can we learn from other countries?
PLAXTIL- A French Firm
It has come up with a way to recycle disposable masks and turn them into raw materials for new products. Situated in the small town of Châtellerault near Tours and has been collecting disposable masks from the collection points set up in local supermarkets. Here masks have to be quarantined for four days and then shredded into pieces and irradiated with UV light, to make masks remnants germ-free. These tiny mask relics are then shredded down even further and mixed with a binding agent to produce the company’s “Plaxtil” plastic product. This newly obtained raw material can be used to make several other products, but it is currently being used to produce plastic visors.
TerraCycle, USA
TerraCycle, a recycling multinational, specialises in hard-to-recycle waste, has come down the same road as Plaxtil. It collects masks and other PPE in special boxes- Zero Waste Box and then they are quarantined for a minimum of 72 hours. The waste is then segregated into categories based on its material composition. The polypropylene-dominant mixture from the face mask is compressed into a crumb-like raw material and the rubber band portion is ground into fine grains in regrinding and blended with recycled plastics as an additive to provide malleability and flexibility to products. The recycled material is used to manufacture a variety of new products including outdoor furniture, outdoor decking, watering cans, storage containers, bins, etc.
Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Australia
Researchers at RMIT University are paving the way for new roads-literally. They have developed a new material that integrates shredded single-use face masks with recycled concrete aggregate (RCA), a substance made of waste materials from smashed buildings, such as concrete chunks, that are compressed up and remodelled.
What, we as people, can do?
You are not expected to be an environmental health expert or possess a special knowledge to keep surrounding clean and pleasing. All we need is to be responsible at our ends in our routine daily actions. The least we can do is not to dump the used mask in public spaces and can wait until we find a rubbish bin where we can safely dispose of them.
A life cycle assessment conducted in the United Kingdom found masks that could be washed and reused are the best option for the environment.The second-best option is reusable masks with replaceable filters.The most environmental-friendly option is a reusable cloth mask and you should always wash your reusable cloth mask after every time you use it.
To conclude, once the pandemic is over, this environmental legacy may continue to last for decades, if not centuries. It is the responsibility of governments and manufactures to make efforts to design such masks that will not harm planet Earth and also consumers should also demand this.
