More masks than fish
The writer is a PhD candidate. He tweets at @Esshahzar
In a bid to flatten the Covid-19 curve, more than half of the world was under lockdown. It is now worthwhile to mention that global carbon emissions dipped by 17% during this time. Our planet witnessed clear blue skies and drastic reductions in air pollution levels — a sight promising for the sustainability of our ecosystem. However, the pandemic is also harming our planet in a very surprising manner — through a relentless rise in ocean pollution. As the production and demand for face masks and gloves quadrupled, Covid-19 waste is ending up in our oceans and threatening the marine life’s ecosystem, which has already been struggling to cope with pre-existing plastic waste. If no urgent action is taken, we will soon have more face masks than fish in our oceans.
Covid-19 waste has become a new source of pollution as single-use personal protective equipment (PPE) floods our fragile oceans. While conducting a litter exercise in France’s Cote d’Azur coast, Operation Mer Propre, a French non-profit organisation, found numerous gloves, masks and bottles of hand sanitisers in the Mediterranean along with the usual litter of plastic waste. This worrying discovery should be very appalling and embarrassing for the human race.
Covid-19 waste is not only visible in the Mediterranean, but it has become a global problem. The other side of the world faces the same predicament. OceansAsia, marine conservation organisation, discovered a huge number of single-use PPE waste during its plastic pollution research. Millions of masks were found on the Soko Islands, near the coast of Hong Kong.
It takes one face mask 450 years to decompose in water. Today, millions of tons of single-use PPE are making their way to the oceans’ seabed. Countries are exploring different avenues to strengthen their existing healthcare infrastructure and they should not turn a blind eye to the ocean’s deteriorating health. Our oceans are on a ventilator but still produce almost 50% of the world’s oxygen and absorb 50 times more carbon dioxide than our atmosphere.
In Pakistan too, our sea’s misery has now been exacerbated with an unprecedented scale of Covid-19 waste, including face masks, gloves and empty sanitiser bottles. Environmentalists have already raised their voices against the medical and plastic waste found at our vulnerable coast lines. All eyes and attention right now is on containing the spread of the pandemic but we should not let the ocean’s misery go unnoticed. Even though our beaches have been in a better shape since the lockdown has been imposed, the new wave of Covid-19 waste is adding fuel to fire.
What we urgently require is a strategic and proper functioning solid waste management (SWM) programme in Pakistan. Provinces have started SWM initiatives but unfortunately, lack of political will and resources have hampered progress. Authorities must understand that creating an eco-friendly waste disposal plan will inevitably benefit everyone in the longer run. Constructive recycling techniques have been introduced and implemented globally.
More than anyone else, the civil society must play a pivotal role in eliminating Covid-19 waste. Citizens must become responsible in disposing off single-use PPE. We need to improve the way we manage our waste. Today, we see face masks lying on the streets, stuck on trees and inevitably ending up in our vulnerable oceans. We are endangering the lives of our marine world in attempts to save our own.
The pandemic has given us an opportunity to not only build our health infrastructure but also invest in climate action, cleaner cities and sustainable oceans. For decades, human activity and accelerated climate change have endangered marine life. Today is the time to reset our attitude towards our fragile oceans and consider its environmental impact on human survival. Let’s learn from our previous mistakes and reverse the ocean’s misery.
Published in The Express Tribune, July 4th, 2020.
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