Thread by @MyMaskFit

@FT: the environmental toll of #masks Consumers currently seem more concerned by style — black, coloured and patterned masks are appearing — than the environmental cost. This could be huge. How can the world curb infection and keep a lid on its trash at the same time?
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Face masks have been standard convenience store goods in Japan for decades. Elsewhere, they are a new mass market product. We are set to get through 129bn masks a month and 65bn pairs of disposable gloves, reckons Ocean Conservancy.

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Most disposable masks are made from polypropylene. They cannot be recycled conventionally. Plastics already make up a big wodge of global waste: 242m tonnes of the 2bn tonnes we junk a year, according to a 2018 World Bank study.

If Britons wore one disposable mask a day for a year, we would end up with more than 124,000 tonnes of plastic waste, academics from @UCL estimate.

As they degrade, disposable masks generate microplastic, with which the environment is already overloaded. The WFF estimates that even if 10m masks a month were junked — a mere 1 per cent of masks used on the NGO’s estimates — that would equate to 40,000kg of excess plastic.

Masks pose other problems when dumped into the sea, snaring seabirds or being eaten by turtles.