18 THE DISRUPTION ISSUE
Coronavirus & The Sustainability Movement It’s a crisp autumn morning as I walk down Thomas Street, and part of me quietly relishes in the steady warmth of my face mask against the unsolicited chill. I speculate whether any of the passing strangers find a similar comfort, especially compared to the the heat of mid-July when face coverings were made mandatory in 2020. They’re not always confined to our faces, though, as I catch sight of one clinging to a gully grate in the road, then another caught in a rustling torrent of leaves. One lies trampled over the grooves and troughs of the traffic crossing, a boot mark emblazoned on the front as clearly as the leopard print on mine. It’s not an uncommon sight to see a solitary blue mask wading in a nearby puddle amongst the discarded cigarette butts. According to a report in the Environment Journal, since face-coverings were made mandatory, 1.6 billion single-use masks are sent to landfill every month in the UK alone, and Waste Free Oceans found that each mask takes approximately 450 years to decompose. Meanwhile The Guardian reported that Laurent Lombard, of Opération Mer Propre, suggested there will soon be more masks in the Mediterranean ocean than jellyfish. This exacerbates an already colossal marine plastic pollution problem. Project lead of Plastic: Redefining Single-Use at The University of Sheffield, Tony Ryan, believes that plastics aren’t innately the problem, but the volume which are unnecessarily single-use. “There are some pieces of single-use plastic that have to be and should never be anything else, but there’s also a lot due to low cost and convenience. This applies just as much to medical plastics as it does to plastic packaging,” Ryan explains.
Environmental caused by Words - Alice Stevens Design - Di Pajarillaga
1.6 billion single-use masks are sent to landfill every month in the UK alone. “Where there’s no need for something to be single-use, we should be keeping the pressure on to move towards things that are reusable. It should still be a priority even during the pandemic.” A distinct increase in single-use plastic is found in food and drink packaging such as disposable coffee cups, which had largely been relinquished before coronavirus. Despite this shift, Ryan refutes the notion that reusables are more unsafe than single-use. “During the pandemic, people think they don’t have to worry about washing their reusable cup or buying prepackaged vegetables, because they’re doing what’s considered ‘safer’. But I think we need to go back to making evidence-based decisions rather than riskaverse decisions. “Environmental problems are caused by economic growth, and if an economic recovery means going back to the consumption patterns that we had before, then these are the things we need to change our views on,” Ryan says. Although many cafes now offer a ‘solution’ by using non-plastic cup alternatives, Recycle for Greater Manchester has noted a significant – yet confusing – difference between biodegradable and compostable products. While compostable products decay and pass nutrients into the surrounding soil, biodegradable products take decades to decompose and cause harm to the environment.
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