Recycling option for discarded masks to curb pollution

A jaw-dropping new graphic reveals the global scale of pollution from used face masks — but there is a way to fix it.

Adelaide businesses are taking up the opportunity to recycle face masks, as the PPE becomes an increasing environmental burden.

US-based company Terra­Cycle offers a zero waste box that businesses or community groups can use to collect used safety equipment and protective gear including face masks.

The company’s head of global content, Jen Walker, based in Sydney, said the full boxes were held in quarantine for at least two months to eliminate the risk of infection. The contents are checked then shredded and run past a magnet to extract the metallic filaments that mould the mask over the nose, as these can be smelted for reuse.

The remaining plastics, mainly polypropylene, are converted into pellets for ­industrial applications such as shipping pallets.

But it is expensive, so it is best done on a large scale.

Ms Walker hoped hospital-grade masks made of one type of material would emerge on the market, because that would be easier to recycle.

But Adelaide manufacturer Detmold has no “short-term” plans to invent a more sustainable design.

The global problem of discarded face masks. Source: visualcapitalist.com

A new Spanish study estimated 1.6 billion disposable masks have found their way into the world’s oceans since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.

While this figure equates to just 3 per cent of the 52 billion disposable face masks produced in 2020, it also adds up to nearly 5000 tonnes of plastic pollution.

Locally there have been no studies of the number of masks thrown away, but Clean Up Australia spokesperson Pip Kiernan said the organisation’s volunteers were seeing a lot more of them.

“You just have to walk down the street to see them,” she said. “Everything we drop on the ground is likely to end up in a waterway.”

The plastic inside polypropylene masks “takes 450 years to break down, and even then the plastic stays around as microplastics,” Ms Kiernan said.

Clean Up Australia is encouraging people to invest in reusable masks, and recycle the disposable ones via TerraCycle collection boxes.

Masks cannot be recycled as part of normal council collections.

Olympic swimmer Taylor McKeown assisted Clean Up Australia with its efforts on the Gold Coast earlier this year. Picture: Adam Head

Hindmarsh Plumbing is among local businesses using the zero waste box, and its quality, health, safety and ­environment co-ordinator Nadia Heinrich encouraged others to try it.

“TerraCycle stood out for the ease of being able to get the boxes,” Ms Heinrich said.

“All we needed to do was choose what size we wanted, order them in, fill them and send them back for recycling, so it’s a really seamless ­recycling solution.”

In NSW, Port Stephens Council recently sponsored a TerraCycle Zero Waste Collection Hub at the Salamander Bay Recycling Centre.

Within the SA government, Green Industries has oversight of waste and ­recycling. A spokesman said the ­government was watching the Port Stephens trial with ­interest.

“Mask use at present is very high and there are certainly companies that are investi­gating if recycling on a large scale is a realistic possibility,” he said.

He said the department was keen to understand whether mask recycling could be done in a safe and eco­nomically viable way.

The current SA Health advice remains that used masks should not be placed in the yellow bin or green bin, and placed inside a waste bin with a lid and a lining if possible.

The RSPCA also advises users to snip the elastic prior to disposal, as the straps can cause problems for wildlife if the item ends up in the environment.

Pip Kiernan is the daughter of Ian Kiernan, and has taken over as the chair of the organisation he set up, Clean Up Australia. Picture: AAP/Troy Snook

Luxury Melbourne hotel the Sofitel is one of the Australian businesses to make use of the TerraCycle boxes. The initiative is part of its internationally-certified commitment to sustainability.

The hotel’s environment manager Johanna Bouniol said employees were changing their masks every four hours, and staff alone were going through 1000 masks per week.

“We are always looking at new ways to reduce waste going into landfill, and we wanted to find a solution to get rid of this waste,” she said.

While the organisation explored cloth masks for staff at the start of the pandemic, the advice from health authorities was disposable surgical masks for customer-facing staff were more hygienic, Ms Bouniol said.

The hotel had already filled “somewhere between 15 and 20” of the TerraCycle boxes since the start of the outbreak, she said.

Johanna Bouniol, Environment Manager at Melbourne's Sofitel hotel, disposes of a mask in a TerraCycle collection box.

Originally published as Recycling option for discarded masks to curb pollution