While masks and other protective items have been vital in the fight against COVID-19, they can have an incredibly detrimental impact on the environment. According to some estimates, humans globally use and dispose of an estimated 129 billion face masks and 65 billion plastic gloves every month.
Inevitably, some of those items will end up in our oceans, where they can wreak havoc on the marine ecosystem. And according to a recent report by conservation organization OceansAsia, the number of face masks that made it into the planet’s oceans this year may be as high as 1.5 billion. The organization based its estimate on 52 billion masks being manufactured in 2020, with a conservative loss ratio of 3 percent. Plastic masks can take hundreds of years to break down.
“The 1.56 billion face masks that will likely enter our oceans in 2020 are just the tip of the iceberg,” Dr. Teale Phelps Bondaroff, Director of Research for OceansAsia, said in a summary of the findings. “The 4,680 to 6,240 metric tonnes of face masks are just a small fraction of the estimated 8 to 12 million metric tonnes of plastic that enter our oceans each year.”