Friday Feature: Personal Protective Equipment or Perpetual Pollution Event?

Each year, I renew my resolution to use less plastic. This year, I expanded it to include using less paper as well. I've switched to microfiber cloths instead of paper towels, inexpensive plates suitable for daily use instead of paper plates, and cloth napkins instead of paper. 

But there's room for improvement. I bought a reusable water bottle that I use about half of the time; when I'm in a hurry, I still grab a water bottle. I have a reusable cup for my daily Starbucks run, but I usually forget to put it in my car.

And then there are masks. According a story yesterday on PBS News Hour, disposable masks, gloves and other PPE may be helping to keep us healthy, but they aren't doing much for fish and wildlife. Way too many masks and gloves are ending up as litter.

I use cloth masks nearly all of the time and when I use a disposable mask, I make sure it ends up in the trash, not along the side of the road.

But that's only part of the issue. 

While I regularly cut the plastic loops that keep those six-packs of soda together before tossing the loops into the trash, it never occurred to me to do the same for mask loops. 

In retrospect, that was pretty silly of me. Fortunately, it's an oversight that's easy to correct moving forward. As for my in-a-hurry-grab-a-water-bottle habit, I recycle the bottles so that's not so bad, right?

Um, that would be a "no."

Suffice it to say that recycling in the United States leaves a lot to be desired and that much of what we think can be recycled actually can't (even though it says so right on the container). Late night host John Oliver did a great, if depressing story on that recently,* as did Frontline about a year ago.

While I know I can't solve this by myself, having this information does make me think twice when I grab that water bottle or reach for a paper plate, and has me considering the same idea for those items that I try to put to use when it comes to junk food: not buying it in the first place.

None of us can fix this alone, but all of us can make a decision not to contribute to the problem so that, when we can finally travel again, our masks will be in our beach bags and on our faces, not along the shoreline. We may not be able to open a plastics recycling facility all on our own, but we improve the situation.

One mask at a time.