Face masks: A boon for humans but a bane for wildlife

After the coronavirus pandemic overshadowed the world and disrupted normal lives, the only to save the lives of humans at the earliest was to wear masks.

At this date, the best precaution a person can take to save themselves from getting COVID-19 is to wear a mask. Major nations have also made it mandatory for people to wear masks in public gatherings and open spaces to prevent the spread of coronavirus. 

However, masks, which have become a boon for people amidst the pandemic, at the same time are becoming a bane for wildlife, birds, and marine creatures. 

Lying scattered around pavements, waterways, or beaches and getting dumped in the sea worldwide, masks are becoming a deadly hazard for the wildlife, marine creatures, and birds. 

A single-use surgical mask, which is worn once, can take hundreds of years to decompose, thus ultimately littering the animal habitats. 

“Face masks aren’t going away any time soon — but when we throw them away, these items can harm the environment and the animals who share our planet,” Ashley Fruno of animal rights group PETA said, AFP reports.

In the bizarre, rather threatening scenes amid the pandemic, Macaques were spotted in the hills outside Malaysia’s Kuala Lumpur, chewing the straps of old, tossed-aside masks, which are a potential chewing hazard. 

In another incident, a gull was rescued in England’s Chelmsford after its legs got tangled in the straps of a disposable mask for up to a week. The incident caught headlines in Britain as the animal welfare charity, the RSPCA, was alerted after the bird was spotted, who was lying motionless but still alive. The gull was later taken to a wildlife hospital for treatment before its release. 

It is clear that the mask was there for some time, said RSPCA inspector Adam Jones, adding that the elastic straps had tightened around the gull’s legs as “his joints were swollen and sore.” 

Meanwhile, the biggest sufferers of the single-use or disposable masks are the marine creatures as seas are getting flooded by used masks, latex gloves, and other protective gears. 

A chief scientist of a US-based NGO Ocean Conservancy said masks and gloves are “particularly problematic” for sea creatures. George Leonard explained to AFP, “When those plastics break down in the environment, they form smaller and smaller particles.”

Those particles then enter the food chain and impact entire ecosystems, he added.

In 2020, more than 1.5 billion masks were dumped into the seas worldwide that accounted for around 6,200 extra tonnes of marine plastic pollution, stated OceansAsia, an environmental group, reports AFP. 

A mask was found inside the stomach of a penguin in Brazil after its body was found washed up on a beach while a dead pufferfish was found caught inside another off the coast in Miami, reports AFP.

In a similar incident in France, a dead crab was found ensnared in a mask in a saltwater lagoon near the Mediterranean in September last year.

Even though, many have now started to opt for reusable cloth masks as the pandemic has worn on, the use of lighter single-use masks is still widely dominant across the world.