By Sonia Soloviova
Two years after the start of Covid-19 pandemic, the world is slowly but surely returning to normal. College students return to campuses, workers head back to their stuffy office jobs, and people finally leave their masks behind when going out with friends. As Covid-tests and face-covering mandates disappear from mainstream American life, many are proudly announcing that we are back to pre-Covid times. And yet, can we responsibly label the world as it is now pre-Covid while taking into consideration the impact the pandemic has had on the environment?
For the past few years, the pandemic era has aggravated greenhouse gas emissions and environmental pollution. The United States has generated over 7,200 tons of medical waste every day since March 2020. The protective gloves and packaging for express tests have contributed to a growing issue of extensive plastic disposal. But, the most environmentally detrimental factor of the pandemic has been the careless disposal and supply of medical masks. Millions of medical face coverings have been thrown out in landfills or have ended up in the oceans. The most common culprit, the N-95, contains plastics that are usually broken down into highly hazardous macroplastic when exposed to sunlight and water.
The extensive increase in plastic pollution has threatened the prosperity of aquatic ecosystems around the west coast of America. Besides atrocious plastic waste, the mandatory usage of masks has significantly increased demand in its production, which correspondingly has expanded the carbon footprint. The growing supply chain has disregarded the water consumption and gas emission in hopes to jump on the skyrocketing sales of personal protection equipment, creating a surplus of masks at expense of eco-friendly production.
Throughout 2020, Asian media and political sectors in China and South Korea encouraged the world to enforce strict regulations on mask disposal–– a suggestion almost as insistent as the mask mandates themselves. Local governments implemented standardization, procedures, and guidelines regarding Covid-19 medical waste management, but the U.S. federal government has publicly accented the importance of such actions on the full scale. This disregard towards the handling of plastic waste has shifted the scientific interest from popularizing options to prevent overload of PPE’s plastic in oceans and garbage disposals to deriving ways to reduce the already accumulated waste.
While many have technically “moved out of Covid times” we cannot forget that there is much to learn and much to be done.
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