COVID-19 Pandemic Pushes Single Use Plastic Waste Outbreak: No Management, No Protection: High Health and Environmental Risk Unveil
At the end of the very first month of the official lockdown to prevent COVID-19 spread in Bangladesh, about 14500 tons of hazardous plastic waste has emerged from the dramatically increased use of single use surgical face masks, hand gloves, hand sanitizers and polythene bags in communities and health care facilities, a recent study by ESDO reveals. About 11.2% of this waste apparently comes from the use of surgical face masks, 21.5% from polythene made normal hand gloves, 20% from surgical hand gloves, 40.9% from the single use polythene shopping bags used for carrying food items and 6.4% from empty containers of hand sanitizers. ESDO has recently conducted a study on single use plastic waste generation at the advent of coronavirus pandemic in Bangladesh.
