As if the COVID-19 pandemic in itself was not already causing the most serious human health challenges, the World Economic Forum (WEF) says the side effects of efforts to push back the virus are creating other problems. .
An informed environmental opinion seems to be booing an article published by the WEF in June last year claiming that coronavirus waste has become “a new form of pollution as single use personal protective equipment [PPE] floods our oceans. ”
Claiming that the onset of the pandemic has brought “a number of unforeseen effects on the environment,” the WEF states that one of those has been “cutting down on recycling and increasing the use of plastic worldwide.” It calls on governments, which are currently engaged in their national vaccination campaigns, to “take action now to achieve green recovery that drives sustainability.”
Over the period of just over a year since the global response to the advent of COVID-19, billions of items of PPE have been deposited on spoil heaps and in waterways worldwide. Face masks and sanitary containers are also disposed of in regular litter bins or sometimes in open streets.
Here in Guyana, a medical executive involved in the COVID-19 nursing care treatment regime told the Stabroek Business last week that “there is no evidence that managing the waste created by the pandemic response is a thought in mind” r authorities at present. ”
Above all the potential health and environmental hazards are the thousands of disposable face masks that are, nowadays, cheaply available and often disposed of at various convenient locations including roadsides .
While conservationists around the world are making their voices heard over this likely pollution threat, there has been no Caribbean-wide warning of the problem, and no regional-wide initiative to reintroduce the practice. This is despite the presence of local and regional public health organizations throughout the Caribbean.
Globally, says the WEF, the pollution problem associated with COVID-19 may be growing worse. He reports that “underwater masks, gloves, hand sanitizer bottles, and other coronavirus waste are already found on our seabeds and washed up on our beaches, joining the detritus on a daily basis. ocean ecosystems. “
The problem, it seems, has now become serious enough for deep-sea divers to point out what they say is the alarming volume of masks and other COVID-19-related waste deposited on the seabed. Away from the Caribbean, divers in Asia have reported multiple masks found off the coast of Hong Kong.
Even before the advent of the waste produced by surface masks and plastic sanitary containers, more than 8 million tonnes of plastics were already deposited in oceans annually, adding to the estimated 150 million tonnes already circulating in marine environments .
In the case of poor countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean, the significant over-occupation in curbing the worse effects of the pandemic often seems to leave little room for any greater effort to push the environmental burden and caused by the potentially harmful waste left behind. behind by used masks and the large volumes of indiscriminately dumped plastic bottles once the sanitizer they originally contained was exhausted.
The figures for some developed countries are even more alarming. One study estimates that, in the UK alone, if each person used a single-use face mask a day for a year, it would create an additional 66,000 tonnes of contaminated waste and 57,000 tonnes of plastic packaging.
While maritime nations have been most affected by this new environmental scourge, deposits of waste associated with COVID-19 are likely to continue in other countries where governments have been slow to respond to the latest threat this to the environment.
The local nursing care officer spoken to by the Stabroek Business said that from about March last year when the earliest signs of COVID-19 first revealed themselves here, the authorities appear to have “failed to consider the importance of the likely beating the effects of indiscriminate dumping of the associated waste. However, it’s not too late to do something, ”the source added.
Globally, there is also concern about the effects of greenhouse gases resulting from import and export restrictions and the decline in shipping availability that would have resulted from the huge amounts of food gone to waste.