A slew of recent news articles sounds the alarm about the growing problem of mask litter. The premise of the stories is that people are tossing their masks on the ground, and it is creating a problem.
You would reach that conclusion if you focused on just the percentage increase of masks found in litter. One global survey said mask litter increased “exponentially” from the start of the pandemic through the end of October 2020. The study blared, “Littered masks have had the greatest change since the pandemic announcement, with an exponential increase from March 2020, resulting in an 84-fold increase on the previous year by October 2020.”
My goodness, it sounds dire! I could imagine mask opponents using this data to claim that widespread mask mandates lead to medical waste litter. After all, the data says when people started wearing masks more, more masks were littered.
But a deeper look into the data shows the mask litter, of course, was nearly nonexistent prior to the pandemic and rose to not quite 1% of all litter by the end of the study. In other words, when you start with nearly nothing and double it, you still have very little.
You can find examples where COVID-related litter is a bigger issue.
Researchers found, “The United Kingdom had the highest proportion of mask, glove, and wipe waste, with masks accounting for more than 5% of all litter and gloves and wipes making up about 1.5%.” And, the study says, “Beach litter surveys in Kenya, 100 days after the first reported COVID-19 case, showed 16.5% of litter associated with COVID-19 (includes sanitizer and soap bottles).”
I have seen some interesting studies about the increase in single-use plastic products since the start of the pandemic. The study said, “Most of the plastic is from medical waste generated by hospitals that dwarfs the contribution from personal protection equipment and online-shopping package material” and five rivers in Asia are identified as carrying large amounts of pandemic-related plastic waste into ocean waters.
Engineers at Cornell University are working on a way to recycle personal protective equipment waste and just published their findings.
This article originally appeared in Covering COVID-19, a daily Poynter briefing of story ideas about the coronavirus and other timely topics for journalists. Sign up here to have it delivered to your inbox every weekday morning.
My university journalism program required us to take a stats class, which has helped me through the years spot when someone’s trying to pull a fast one with numbers.