The onset of the COVID_19 pandemic has taken an unprecedented toll on both humankind and the planet. If man has paid for rapid globalization at the cost of his health, the planet has been bearing the brunt of the precautionary measures that have arisen as a fall out. With the mask mandate taking over the world, billions of people across the world have been opting for single use masks to guard against the potentially deadly virus. In 2020 alone 52 billion disposable face masks were manufactured globally. About 1.56 billion of these ended up in our oceans along with a huge volume of single-use plastic and disposables like never before. With people keen to cut down the risk of infection, single-use plastic saw a resurgence. Used face masks and these disposables have been clogging city gutters and streams and eventually finding their way into our oceans, posing a hazard to marine life. Asia in particular was harder hit due to to relatively sub-par waste management systems in place on the continent.
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