key: cord-0870570-0wds2icd
authors: Benson, Nsikak U.; Fred-Ahmadu, Omowunmi H.; Bassey, David E.; Atayero, Aderemi A.
title: COVID-19 pandemic and emerging plastic-based personal protective equipment waste pollution and management in Africa
date: 2021-02-13
journal: J Environ Chem Eng
DOI: 10.1016/j.jece.2021.105222
sha: 2cb4977e508157fb567eb2377db57d3b70ce2938
doc_id: 870570
cord_uid: 0wds2icd

The threat of plastic waste pollution in African countries is increasing exponentially since the World Health Organisation declared the coronavirus infection as a pandemic. Fundamental to this growing threat are multiple factors, including the increased public consumption for single-use plastics, limited or non-existence of adequate plastic waste management infrastructures, and urbanisation. Plastics-based personal protective equipment including millions of surgical masks, medical gowns, face shields, safety glasses, protective aprons, sanitiser containers, plastics shoes, and gloves have been widely used for the reduction of exposure risk to Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). This paper estimates and elucidates the growing plethora of plastic wastes in African countries in the context of the current SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. A Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectral fingerprint indicates that face masks were characterised by natural and artificial fibres including polyester fibres, polypropylene, natural latex resin. Our estimate suggests that over 12 billion medical and fabric face masks are discarded monthly, giving the likelihood that an equivalent of about 105,000 tonnes of face masks per month could be disposed into the environment by Africans. In general, 15 out of 57 African countries are significant plastic waste contributors with Nigeria (15%), Ethiopia (8.6%), Egypt (7.6%), DR Congo (6.7%), Tanzania (4.5%), and South Africa (4.4%) topping the list. Therefore, this expert insight is an attempt to draw the attention of governments, healthcare agencies, and the public to the potential risks of SARS-CoV-2-generated plastics (COVID plastic wastes), and the environmental impacts that could exacerbate the existing plastic pollution epidemic after the COVID-19 pandemic.

mandatory use of plastic-based personal protective equipment by frontline healthcare practitioners and face masks for people leaving their homes.

In Africa, several countries including Kenya, Morocco, Egypt, Central African Republic, South Africa, Angola, Ethiopia, Equatorial Guinea, DR Congo, Liberia, Benin, Zambia, Sierra Leone, Gabon, Burkina Faso, Cameroun, and Rwanda have gazetted official regulations on the mandatory use of medical-grade or cloth face masks in public spaces and the workplace (Aljazeera News, 2020; Kabatanya, 2020; PDA, 2020; Tasamba, 2020) . In West Africa, the use of face mask in the public place has been made compulsory in Nigeria, Chad, Ghana, Mali, Mauritania, Senegal, Liberia, and Guinea Bissau. In contrast, Togo, Niger and Gambia have recommended face masks use in some areas (SWAC, 2020) . In most countries, violators could face periods of imprisonment or pay fines. These policies became necessary, considering that an increasing number of researches have suggested that face masks serve as an efficacious means of controlling the spread of coronavirus. The prime vehicle of SARS-CoV-2 community transmission is through respiratory droplets when an infected or an asymptomatic patient sneezes, coughs or communicates with others. Hence, the mandatory use of face masks (surgical brands or homemade face coverings act as barriers to prevent or limit the viruscontaining droplets from being transmitted from an infected patient to others in public spaces (Aydin et al., 2020; Furukawa et al., 2020; Rothe et al., 2020) . Presently, protecting public safety and conquering the virus remains the priority of governments and healthcare agencies.

However, the measures adopted in stemming COVID-19 must not be misconstrued to mean the license to suspend the war on single-use plastics or the government-backed support to pollute our terrestrial and marine environments with disposable plastics.

Africa is the second-largest continent in the world, with a fast population growth estimated at 1.34 billion people for 2020 (Worldometer, 2020) . According to this estimate, Africa accounts for about 17% of the total world population, with an average of 49% of the people living in the urban and semiurban communities. Besides the unprecedented concentration of people in the urban centres, the burgeoning middle-class population in African countries has created vast consumer markets for plastic products (Jambeck et al., 2018; Deloitte, 2014) . In most countries, traditional methods of food products and shop items packaging have been superseded by plastic food packages and plastic takeaway containers. In retail outlets, shops, supermarkets, street and food vending businesses, and major markets across Africa, single-used plastics are widely used for packaging merchandises and food products, thus increasing the consumption rate of plastics in the continent (Adam et al., 2020; Meizah et al., 2015) .

In the last few decades, the African continent has witnessed a proportionate increase in plastic production and per capita consumption as its population grows coupled with rapid urbanisation (Jambeck et al., 2015 (Jambeck et al., , 2018 . However, given inadequate facilities to manage the large quantity of plastic waste generated coupled with the existence of weak regulation on municipal waste management, a large number of plastic debris end up as inadequately disposed and littered wastes. These mismanaged plastics wastes are at high risk of polluting rivers, waterways, and the ocean.

Since the COVID-19 was discovered and the WHO declared its spread as a public health emergency, several African countries have made it mandatory for its citizens to wear face J o u r n a l P r e -p r o o f masks, or face shields especially while in public spaces. Several commercially sold surgical grade masks are manufactured from sheets of plastics intended for use as single-use plastics (SUPs).

However, in most countries, these imported surgical grade masks largely made from nonwoven polypropylene are expensive and in short supply. As a result, people have resorted to improvisation and homemade production of cloth face covering or masks, sewed commonly from textiles (mainly cotton). These cloth face masks are mostly reusable and are recommended as a substitute for surgical-grade masks to reduce the transmission of coronavirus (CDC, 2020; Mahase, 2020; MacIntyre and Chughtai, 2015) . However, most of these single-use personal protective equipment are mismanaged resulting in indiscriminate disposal and widespread contamination of the terrestrial, atmospheric and aquatic environments. This paper provides a survey of the polymeric characteristics of some commercially available face masks in Africa. We report here the first estimates of single-use face masks generated by countries in Africa during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as highlight the potential risks mismanaged SUPs could pose to public health and the environment. The paper has also identified some plastic management challenges in Africa and proposes mitigation measures to address the problem of plastic pollution epidemic in Africa.

We collected samples of commercially available surgical-grade (SG) (n = 100) and

Filtering facepiece 2 (FFP2) (n = 50) face masks bought from major pharmaceutical companies in Ogun State, while the homemade (HM) (n = 30) face masks were purchased from street J o u r n a l P r e -p r o o f hawkers in Lagos and Ogun States. The sample collections were randomly done in June 2020.

After collection, the face masks were sorted and cut into 3 × 3 cm using a Sparco stainless steel scissors. It is imperative to note that that the face masks used in this work does not represent all the various single-use PPEs in Africa or the multiple products and brands commercially available in African countries. It could however be taken as an arbitrary representative of face masks used and discarded in the continent. To determine the types of polymer in the various face masks collected, a Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy was used to characterise the SG, HM and FFP2 face masks samples. The characterization was performed in the attenuated total reflectance (ATR) mode using the Agilent 630 Cary FTIR Spectrometer equipped with a diamond crystal at a resolution of 8 cm -1 , 32 sample scans and a range of 4000 -650 cm -1 . For measurement of spectra of face masks samples collected, each sample was introduced directly and clamped onto the ATR diamond crystal after performing the clean check. A relative pressure was applied to close the press, and the analysis was done using the Agilent MicroLab® software for the determination of a spectrum of satisfactory intensity. The Agilent polymer ATR library and the Sigma-Aldrich® Online Infra-red Spectrum Table and Chart were utilised to evaluate the absorptions and vibrations for functional groups in each polymer.

The acceptable match quality was fixed at ≥ 80%. (Baskaran and Sathiavelu, 2020; Fred-Ahmadu et al., 2020a,b) . The representative spectra for samples of SG, HM and FFP2 face masks polymers are presented in Fig. 2 .

The daily single-use face masks generated by each country in Africa is estimated as a function of the total population of a country, daily face mask use per capita and an arbitrary percent of J o u r n a l P r e -p r o o f facemask acceptance rate by the urban population (Nzediegwu and Chang, 2020) . The total monthly and daily estimated face mask generations were computed according to the following equations: 

The spectra established that the textile fibres of the face mask brands were characterised by a combination of natural and artificial fibres including polyester fibres (PE), polypropylene (PP), natural latex resin (NL), polyethylene terephthalate, styrene isoprene, and styrene butadiene rubber. The FTIR spectra verified the appearance of the absorption bands that are typical of polypropylene: vibrations linked with C-C bonding (1200 -800 cm −1 ), CH 2 scissor vibrations and CH 3 symmetric deformation vibrations or CH 3 asymmetric deformation vibrations (1453-1356 cm −1 ), and CH 2 and CH 3 symmetric and asymmetric stretching vibrations (2950 -2830 cm −1 ) ( Fig. 2 ) (Marković et al., 2020; Kostov et al., 2013) .

Also, the FTIR spectra confirmed the presence of PE synthetic fibres in the FFP2 (3M) and homemade face masks (Fig. 2) . The spectra showed various characteristic absorption bands associated with polyester fibres including the moderately intense C-H stretching (2840 -3000 cm −1 ), strong C-H bending (723 cm −1 ) and medium C=C out-of-plane bending vibrations of the benzene rings (872 cm −1 ). The absorption bands that appear at 1013 and 3369 cm −1 are linked with the OH out-of-plane bending in the terminal carboxylic groups and intermolecular OH bonded to C=O groups in the polyester chains, respectively, while the peak at 1710 cm −1 indicates the appearance of a strong C=O stretching band for the carboxylic group (Sharma et al., 2020; Kale et al., 2018; Peets et al., 2017) . On the other hand, the spectral fingerprints of natural latex rubber (NL) indicated characteristic absorption peaks at 2952, 2914, 2870, and 2836 cm −1 and are assigned to moderately intense C-H stretching vibration, medium C=C stretching for alkene at peak 1651 cm −1 , while the absorption peaks at 1457 cm −1 and 1375 cm -1 are attributed to carbon-hydrogen deformation for CH 2 group and carbon-hydrogen deformation for CH 3 group, respectively (Bhadra et al., 2019) . Therefore, it is well established that PE, PP and NL were the most dominant fibres in face mask brands.

With the current consumption of SUPs especially surgical masks and homemade (fabric) face masks, if people in the urban and semi-urban areas in all countries in Africa used at least one mask each day at the rate 70% face mask acceptance, the estimated volume of face masks generated and disposed of in a day per capita would be about 412 million pieces, with over 100 J o u r n a l P r e -p r o o f (Boyle, 2020; Chaudhuri, 2020) .

According to our estimations based on the proportion of total plastic wastes (TPWs) in municipal solid wastes, and the quantity of waste generation per capita in African countries, the calculated fraction of mismanaged plastic waste produced by each country is presented in Table   1 . However, it should be noted that the estimated TPWs generation by a country is the quantity J o u r n a l P r e -p r o o f derived before formal waste management involving sorting, recycling, or incineration. Thus, TPWs does not depict the volume of plastics at risk of polluting the gullies, inland waterways, canals, creeks, rivers, estuarine and the marine ecosystems.

The results of this study indicated that 15 out of 57 countries in Africa are major contributors of single-use plastic wastes, contributing about 75% of the TPWs in the continent per year with Nigeria (15%), Ethiopia (8.6%), Egypt (7.6%), DR Congo (6.7%), Tanzania (4.5%),

and South Africa (4.4%) topping the list (Fig. 4 & 5) . These countries mostly have extensive maritime coastal zones bordering the ocean. Therefore, the existence of poor or limited waste management facilities in these countries could result in the littering and direct introduction of land-based derived plastic wastes into the beaches and ocean.

In most developing countries in Africa, it is a common practice to discard domestic and

industrial wastes in open landfills, wastewater gullies, inland waterways, poorly managed and uncontrolled dumpsites, street bins, drainage canals and paved walkways. Over the years, these dumpsites and landfills have become very problematic to manage, and a rallying point where waste scavengers visit to forage for the recovery of waste recyclables. Waste pickers or hunter are essential players in the informal waste management, especially in developing countries

where it serves as a quick source of income for the urban poor (Asim et al., 2012; Sembiring and Nitivattananon, 2010; Ahmed and Ali, 2004) . Informal waste management in most African countries is dominated by landfill scavengers, itinerant waste hunters, and neighbourhood J o u r n a l P r e -p r o o f waste pickers who primarily engage in uncontrolled activities of waste collection, sorting and recycling (Oguntoyinbo, 2012; Tremblay et al., 2010; Imam et al., 2007) . The scavenging of littered heaps for potentially recyclable materials is usually carried out without wearing suitable personal protective equipment. In Nigeria, it has been reported that scavengers are engaged in collecting discarded face masks from open dumps for recycling and resale to the unsuspecting public (Folorunsho-Francis, 2020). Although waste picking in third world countries may serve as a means of livelihood and escape from poverty for the impoverished few, it could potentially be a vehicle for the spread of infectious diseases including COVID-19 (Doremalen et al., 2020; Moss et al., 2017; Vasickova et al., 2010) . Recent reports have identified the stability and survivability of COVID-19 virus on contaminated fomites including plastics, banknotes, stainless steel, cardboard, copper, wood, and face masks (Doremalen et al., 2020; Chin et al., 2020) . The studies showed that the infectious viral particles of SARS-CoV-2 is exceptionally contagious and could remain viable on a range of surfaces for several minutes and up to 9 days (Doremalen et al., 2020; Kampf et al., 2020) . Coronaviruses on plastics and stainless-steel surfaces were found to be more viable and stable for 2 to 3 days than cardboard, wood, banknotes and copper (Chin et al., 2020; Doremalen et al., 2020) . Therefore, the spread and infectivity of COVID-19 through inadequately disposed or littered wastes could be filliped by scavengers and informal waste collectors upon exposure to contaminated materials.

The question surrounding how COVID-19 virus is transmitted and the strategies to stop the virus from spreading has generated a growing global concern over the use of single-use plastics, thus dampening the war against plastic pollution. Over the past months, millions of people around the world have been compelled to observe the government-issued directives on J o u r n a l P r e -p r o o f lockdown as a measure of reducing the spread of the virus. COVID-19 has been described as a zoonotic disease that originated at the end of December 2019 in Wuhan in Hubei Province, China and has spread to over 212 countries and territories around the world and two international conveyances (Worldometers, 2020; Mackenzie & Smith, 2020; Bogoch et al., 2020; Guo et al., 2020) . As of early July 2020, the outbreak recorded over 12 million confirmed coronavirus cases worldwide, with at more than half a million deaths (Worldometers, 2020) . In Africa, over 500,000 and 12,000 confirmed COVID-19 cases and deaths have been recorded as at early July 2020 (Fig. 6 , Table 1 ). According to the WHO, SARS-CoV-2 virus is primarily transmitted via saliva droplets or release from the nostril when an infected patient sneezes or coughs (WHO, 2020a).

Past investigations have shown that contaminated surfaces are principal vehicles for the spread of viral infections (Jones and Gibson, 2020; Park et al., 2015) . The presence of COVID-19 ribonucleic acid on surfaces of inappropriately released single-use clinical materials has been reported (Chin et al., 2020; Doremalen et al., 2020) . As indicated by reported studies, COVID-19

RNA has been discovered to be more stable and potent for 2 to 3 days on plastics and treated steel surfaces than on cardboard, wood, banknotes and copper (Chin et al., 2020; Doremalen et al., 2020) . In addition, the epidemiological information from the studies revealed that coronavirus could be detected on the outer surfaces of face masks for a few minutes and as long as 2.8 days after exposure (Fig. 7) . These data confirm the stability and viability of COVID-19 infection through infected face masks and other clinical wastes (Doremalen et al., 2020; Nghiem et al., 2020; Todd et al., 2009) . Thus, it is imperative to reappraise existing waste J o u r n a l P r e -p r o o f management in Africa countries to avoid community infection of people through exposed surfaces and disposed contaminated face masks. Additionally, inappropriate collection and management of COVID-19 wastes, including littering, disposal in uncontained landfills and open dumps may likely exacerbate the current plastic waste pollution in the continent.

Plastic pollution has been identified as a growing environmental and public health challenge.

The sorption of carcinogenic and endocrine-disrupting chemicals onto bulk plastics and micro-, meso-, and macro-plastics in the terrestrial environment and marine ecosystems has been widely reported (Amereh et al., 2020; Benson & Fred-Ahmadu, 2020; Jiang et al., 2020; Prata et al., 2020; Trifuoggi et al., 2019; Chae & An, 2017) . However, the magnitude of this problem and the call for measures to address the worsening plastic pollution crises have grown only lately to a higher level of public consciousness, especially since the inception of the COVID-19 pandemic.

To address the problem of plastic pollution epidemic in Africa, the following recommendations are advocated:

a h) Furthermore, we suggest that designated waste receptacles should be provided at marked points in public places, healthcare facilities, shopping malls, markets, banks, worship centres, schools, and residential estates to collect used PPEs. In view of this, periodical emptying and routine decontamination of the waste containers must be carried out by trained hazardous waste handlers in line with laid down guidelines (Africa CDC, 2020; WHO, 2020b; EU, 2020).

i) In general, as the coronavirus pandemic continues, a strong recommendation to the government, health workers, medical experts, and the public would be to prevent plastic pollution by being individually, communally and globally responsible.

All data used in this study are publicly available and are referenced in the manuscript.

This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors. 

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David Bassey: Conceptualization; Nsikak Benson: Data curation; Nsikak Benson, Omowunmi Fred-Ahmadu: Formal analysis; Nsikak Benson, David Bassey: Investigation; Nsikak Benson

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Figure 2: Representative spectra and absorption bands for surgical-grade (SG), homemade (HM) and Filtering facepiece 2 (FFP2) face masks polymers: polyester fibres (PE), natural latex resin (NL), and polypropylene (PP)

The authors acknowledge the invaluable comments by reviewers.J o u r n a l P r e -p r o o f

The author is not aware of any affiliations, memberships, funding, or financial interest that might be perceived as affecting the objectivity of this paper.