By the end of August 2021, more than eight million tons of plastic waste associated with the COVID-19 pandemic were produced. According to the estimates of researchers from China and the United States, whose article on environmental damage from a pandemic is published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, more than 25 thousand tons from this quantity have already fallen into the ocean.
For its calculations, scientists from California and Nanjing universities used a model to reproduce the spread of the pandemic formed in 193 countries of plastic garbage (masks, tests for tests, hospital waste) in the aquatic environment – as it is decomposed under the action of sunlight and plankton , It is transferred over the surface of the oceans and lowered to the depth.
It turned out that the COVID-19 pandemic led to the formation of an additional 8.6 million tons of plastic waste. At the same time, 87.4 percent of all these waste falls on hospitals. On the use of disposable masks accounts for 7.6 percent, the tests are 0.3 percent. The largest amount of 25.9 thousand tons of garbage in the ocean was brought by rivers, 73 percent of which proceed to Asia. Three main pollutants – Shatt-El-Arab, Ind and Yangtze, in the sixth place is Amur. On European rivers only 11 percent of washed.
According to researchers, after three to five years, most of the garbage located now in the ocean will turn out to be on the beaches or drops to the bottom. At the same time, his part will remain in the oceanic basins, and that it is especially disturbed by the researchers, in the Arctic Ocean, where by 2025 an indolar zone of plastic accumulation can be formed.