Disposable Face Masks Drive Huge Rise in Protective Equipment Waste

They are the item that represented the Covid-19 pandemic, and in many ways saved us from it, but they’ve also become a massive problem in their own right.The number of face masks found in litter globally has rapidly increased  more than 80-fold because of the Covid-19 pandemic, a new study has found. Scientists in 11 countries, used a litter-recording  app called Litterati to quantify the increase they have seen in discarded  personal protective equipment (PPE) since early 2020.Besides an 84-times increase in dropped masks, the study also revealed gloves and wipes had more than doubled in litter volumes.

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