WASHINGTON – Ocean Conservancy has published a report revealing that its global network of International Coastal Cleanup (ICC) partners and volunteers collected 107,219 items of personal protective equipment, or PPE, from beaches and waterways worldwide in the second half of 2020 alone.
The report, Pandemic Pollution: The Rising Tide of Plastic PPE, comes approximately a year after the World Health Organization first declared the Covid-19 outbreak. While scientists have published various estimates of the amount of masks and gloves used and ending up in the environment since the start of the pandemic, few studies have used actual litter counts on such a global, consistent scale to measure the problem.