COVID waste: Archaeologists have a role to play in informing environmental policy – Phys.org

The 2020 COVID-19 pandemic is creating a viral archive, an archaeological record of history in the making. One aspect of this archive is increased environmental pollution, not least through discarded face-masks and gloves, collectively known as PPE, that characterise the pandemic.
These items of plastic waste have become symbolic of the pandemic and have now entered the archaeological record, in particular face-masks.
In the UK alone, 748 million items of PPE, amounting to 14 million items a day,…

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