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You might have heard about the positive impacts of the worldwide lockdown on the marine environment. The world seems to be very content with the recovery of our beloved oceans, as fishing practices have slowed down, giving the marine animals some time to repopulate, waterways transportation has declined, reducing water pollution, and dolphins and sea turtles are able to swim closer to the shore, due to reduced human activity at beaches.

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This is all great, and we apologize for being the bearer of bad news, because not only is this change not enough, but there are also two very peculiar storms brewing in the background, masked by the chaotic nature of the current times, with one storm getting ready to hit much sooner than the other.

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Since the beginning of the pandemic, although the production of Municipal Solid Waste (MSW), the waste that's collected at our homes' curbside, has either gone down in some places or stayed the same in others, the production of Regulated Medical Waste (RMW), the waste that's considered to be dangerous to handle due to potential contamination by pathogens, has increased exponentially as hospitals and medical facilities run through Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) such as gloves, surgical masks, and N95 respirators at alarming rates. medical waste is different from regular waste in that it can't be shipped straight to recycling. It needs to be treated first to sterilize and kill all potential pathogens present on the materials. Ergo, Biohazard Medical Waste is treated at specialized treatment plants. Here's a figure that shows the flowrate of waste into MSW treatment facilities (in blue) compared to Medical Waste treatment facilities (in red) during a pandemic. Due to the lack of treatment facilities, believe it or not, potentially dangerous medical waste is discarded at open landfills and worse. Landfills are the last place at which untreated medical waste, if not any waste, should end up. These landfill wastes can spread diseases through the air and pollute our water systems, resulting in the accumulation of plastics and microplastics in the ocean.

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The slow down of the world also means a slow down in the economy, and that has very serious impacts in people's lives, hence it's been predicted that, when people return back to normal life, there will be more travel, more consumption, and more environmental exploitation than there was before the pandemic. Businesses will try to catch up to what they lost in profit, and people will try to catch up to what they lost in time, all before the ocean gets a chance to say "thanks". To make these positive impacts last, we have to want the change enough to cause the change. When everything's said and done, we don't want this time of temporary relief to be seen as another missed opportunity to make something permanent. Click below to find out how to do your part by being a responsible consumer of materials. If you're a medical facility looking to solve environmental problems related to RMW, a list of our suggestions for best practices is also available in the link below:

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