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The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the plague of plastic in the world’s oceans. Divers in the Philippines say that after returning to coral reefs when a national closure was lifted, they were horrified to find more plastic in the sea than they had ever seen before, including numerous surgical masks, reports the BBC. One diving professional says that in the first ten minutes of a dive at a coral reef in Batangas, southeast of Manila, he collected at least a dozen masks from the reef, some of which were covered with algae and were clearly there for months.
Environmental groups warn that plastic in the masks breaks down into microplastics consumed by marine life. They call on the government to impose stricter controls on the disposal of medical waste. Researchers that Manila alone produces 280 extra tons of such waste daily during the pandemic. And the problem is worldwide: last year, in the early months of the pandemic, fighters in France said they had found large quantities of personal protective equipment in the Mediterranean and warned that there would soon be “more masks than jellyfish”, the Guardian reports. They appealed to the public to adopt reusable masks instead of disposable masks. (Read more face mask stories.)