It’s a common sight: single-use face masks littering city streets. These disposable masks are made from polypropylene, a fossil fuel-derived plastic that takes hundreds of years to disintegrate. The pollution problem is global and extends to water systems, where some of them end up.
According to a December 2020 report from the Hong-Kong based environmental group OceansAsia, more than 1.5 billion disposable masks will have made it into the world’s oceans in the last year alone, adding to the tonnes of plastic produced annually by industry. And that’s a conservative estimate, based on just 3 percent of the 52 billion disposable masks produced for the pandemic to the end of 2020. The rest of which - 50.44 billion - have presumbably ended up in landfill.
Is this another example of the revenge of unintended consequences, common to technological advance? Although there is a debate on whether or not single-use masks are washable, this may be a problem with an ready solution: reusable masks over the blue and gray disposable variety, some brands of which the Canadian government has deemed risky to humans, to say nothing of marine life.
Let’s not make a future fictional Chuck Heston unhappy.
Here in staid old Victoria, the masks are littering the sidewalks. LUC is one of those pesky things we can neither see nor solve. So while hastening the demise of our oceans, we are 'saving' ourselves for the day when the ocean no longer provides us with oxygen ...estimated to be around 2060.