It will take years to fully understand the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the environment, but a new study has shed some light on it. The study was conducted by the University of Portsmouth in the U.K. and it displays how much litter was generated from the first wave. It was published on Thursday in the journal Nature Sustainability.
The study was called the “Increased personal protective equipment litter as a result of COVID measures,” It compared and analyzed data from Oxford University, the “COVID-19 Government Response Tracker”, and the litter collection app “Litterati,” Those two sources are both open-source databases, so the public has access to it.
They specifically used data from 11 countries including Canada, France, Germany, Belgium, Spain, the U.K., the U.S., the Netherlands, Sweden, Australia, and New Zealand. The researchers then mapped their policy responses to the pandemic, such as things like lockdown severity and mask restrictions. The study found that mask litter increased 9,000 per cent from March to October 2020.
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