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. 2020 Nov 10:742:140565.
doi: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2020.140565. Epub 2020 Jun 30.

Rethinking and optimising plastic waste management under COVID-19 pandemic: Policy solutions based on redesign and reduction of single-use plastics and personal protective equipment

Ana L Patrício Silva  1 , Joana C Prata  2 , Tony R Walker  3 , Diana Campos  4 , Armando C Duarte  2 , Amadeu M V M Soares  4 , Damià Barcelò  5 , Teresa Rocha-Santos  2
Affiliations

Rethinking and optimising plastic waste management under COVID-19 pandemic: Policy solutions based on redesign and reduction of single-use plastics and personal protective equipment

Ana L Patrício Silva et al. Sci Total Environ. .

Abstract

Plastics have been on top of the political agenda in Europe and across the world to reduce plastic leakage and pollution. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has severely disrupted plastic reduction policies at the regional and national levels and induced significant changes in plastic waste management with potential for negative impacts in the environment and human health. This paper provides an overview of plastic policies and discusses the readjustments of these policies during the COVID-19 pandemic along with their potential environmental implications. The sudden increase in plastic waste and composition due to the COVID-19 pandemic underlines the crucial need to reinforce plastic reduction policies (and to implement them into action without delays), to scale up in innovation for sustainable and green plastics solutions, and to develop dynamic and responsive waste management systems immediately. Policy recommendations and future research directions are discussed.

Keywords: Bioplastics; Environmental sustainability; Plastic pollution; Plastic waste; SARS-Cov-2.

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Conflict of interest statement

Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Figures

Unlabelled Image
Graphical abstract
Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Legal limits on single-use-plastics (SUPs) per country or state-wide in the case of the United States. Some islands and countries may not be discerned in the figure due to the map scale. Information based on UNEP (2018); NCEL (2019). Created with mapchart.net ©.
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Government initiatives on plastic bag reduction policies. Black four-pointed stars represent countries or states (in case of the United States, U.S.) that have withdrawn or postponed plastic bag initiatives. Some islands and countries may not be discerned in the figure due to the map scale. Information based on Nielsen et al. (2019); Schnurr et al. (2018); Xanthos and Walker (2017); UNEP (2018); NCEL (2019). Created with mapchart.net ©.
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
Mandatory (or highly recommended) use of masks per country or state-wide in the case of U.S. Some islands and countries may not be discerned in the figure due to the map scale. Created with mapchart.net ©. More info Aljazeera News (2020); DN, 2020a, DN, 2020b; Andrew and Froio (2020); Sheridan (2020). Created with mapchart.net ©.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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