Past Covid, Mountains of Waste Await

A vision of the dangers confronting the planet and its people from the climate- and broader eco-crises is all too slowly coming into focus as people and governments move beyond pandemic mode, with trepidation in many cases. The last two years have brought a “mountain” of increased, often toxic waste and a damaging loss of focus on the planetary issues that are ultimately much more critical to the future of humanity than any single coronavirus. We must get that focus back, quickly.

I have suffered less than many over the last two years from fear of the Covid-19 virus itself — but more than most from fear of climate change and the eco-crisis. I watched in horror as discarded face masks accumulated on sidewalks and in trashcans; as individual plastic packaging of vegetables and fruits reemerged in full force; as people drove more to avoid much lower carbon-emitting public transportation. The list of polluting behaviors we rushed into in our panic goes on and on.

The World Health Organization itself put out a report in January providing a partial description of the “global mountain of pandemic-related waste” that resulted. It homes in on the small subset of “healthcare waste generated through the UN procurement system.” Even this narrow category contains roughly 87,000 tons of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) that is mostly plastic and mostly ending up in landfill, the report says.

Estimates for aspects of the full Covid-waste mountain get to such awesome heights as 144,000 tons of additional syringes, needles and safety boxes, according to WHO. That’s additional to the levels of healthcare waste in 2019, which one in three healthcare facilities worldwide failed to manage safely.

Perhaps most horrifying is an early estimate “based on country mask mandates and public mask use” that, in 2020, up to 3.4 billion single-use masks were discarded each day. That’s 1.24 trillion — with a “t” — masks for 2020 alone. The study, by academics from Nigeria, Canada and Australia, has been cited by the US National Institutes of Health, as well as WHO.

That is not a harmless precaution that costs little, as it’s sometimes termed. If you want to mask, great, but get a reusable cloth mask and reuse it.

Tip of the Wasteberg

Medical waste is just the tip of the pandemic’s environmental cost. It leaves aside the greater use of plastic food packaging, the masses of boxes and plastic from online shopping and take-out food. Etc.

Even more important, it leaves aside the tremendous loss of momentum after the September, 2019 Global Climate Strike, when an estimated 4 million people from more than 160 countries, many of them teenagers, filled streets protesting governments’ failure to deal meaningfully with the climate crisis, demanding an end to “blah, blah, blah.”

For the climate crisis looked at in isolation, there were some positive offsetting developments during the pandemic. Because people drove and flew less, CO2 emissions from fossil fuel use fell dramatically in 2020 and are not expected to get back up to 2019 levels this year, if ever.

But the overall impact on the earth and its non-human inhabitants has been dreadful, as the pandemic exposed the hugely high priority most people put on human lives in the near-term over human, animal and plant life in the future — or merely in less visible spots.

Pollution kills, at least as certainly as coronaviruses kill. The UN this month issued a study by Special Rapporteur David Boyd, who calculates that waste and air pollution contribute to over 9 million premature deaths per year, much more than the 5.86 million deaths estimated over two years of the Covid-19 epidemic.

Pandemic Probabilities

Nor is the pandemic itself a one-off event, unrelated to the climate crisis or the broader pollution calamity. Viruses associated with the failing health and habitat of wildlife have been increasing for decades and may well make massive pandemics — some much deadlier than Covid-19 — regular events.

Consider coronaviruses alone. Three coronavirus pandemics have already emerged this century: Besides Covid-19 (SARS-CoV-2), Sars (SARS-CoV) hit East Asia and other spots in 2002–03; and Mers showed up in the Middle East, first in 2012 and sporadically since. Both spread less rampantly but have much higher mortality rates than Covid-19. Of those identified as having Mers, nearly 35% died; with Sars, nearly 10%; with Covid, well under 2%.

Both Mers and Sars have been traced with reasonable confidence to the interface between wild animals and humans. That interface is also the most likely source of Covid-19, most scientists agree.

Then consider flu viruses, not only the relatively mild annual varieties, but also the devastating Spanish flu (H1N1) of a century ago. The US CDC estimates it had a mortality rate of 10% and afflicted roughly one-third of the global population, killing some 50 million of the world’s then 1.5 billion people.

Viruses appear in non-human animals, too. In 2018–19, roughly half of the 500 million or so pigs then in China either died of or were slaughtered to limit the spread of a viral disease known as African Swine Fever (ASF), although it probably didn’t come from Africa. ASF has since spread across East Asia, and turned up in Europe and the Caribbean. It kills 90% or more of infected animals.

Luckily AFS, like most animal viruses, hasn’t so far definitively crossed the species barrier to humans. There’s thought to be a rising risk of such viral spread, however, as more humans move or go for recreation out into the wilderness; as they eat more exotic foods from these areas; and as intense resource exploitation and climate change put many species under strain.

It seems that the mass of animal species threatened with extinction from climate change and other pollution will not go quietly. If they go, they will leave heightened human health risks behind.

Humanity must find new modes of interacting with other animals and plants in order to preserve biodiversity and also reduce the likelihood of recurring pandemics. This requires that people rechannel their fear into a broader, more action-oriented focus on the natural world. People cannot save themselves by destroying the planet and the other creatures with whom we share it.