Sustainable management of plastic wastes in COVID-19 pandemic: The biochar solution

Abstract

To prevent the COVID-19 transmission, personal protective equipment (PPE) and packaging materials have been extensively used but often managed inappropriately, generating huge amount of plastic waste. In this review, we comprehensively discussed the plastic products utilized and the types and amounts of plastic waste generated since the outbreak of COVID-19, and reviewed the potential treatments for these plastic wastes. Upcycling of plastic waste into biochar was addressed from the perspectives of both environmental protection and practical applications, which can be verified as promising materials for environmental protections and energy storages. Moreover, novel upcycling of plastic waste into biochar is beneficial to mitigate the ubiquitous plastic pollution, avoiding harmful impacts on human and ecosystem through direct and indirect micro-/nano-plastic transmission routes, and achieving the sustainable plastic waste management for value-added products, simultaneously. This suggests that the plastic waste could be treated as a valuable resource in an advanced and green manner.

Keywords: Circular economy; Engineered biochar; Environmental protection; Plastic pollution; Sustainable waste management; Upcycling.

Fig. 1

Scientometric visualization of the top 50 keywords of all peer-reviewed publications released last 2 years. Total 507 publications were retrieved from Web of Science with “COVID-19” and “plastic” as the searching keywords (topic), and the database was selected as the “Web of Science Core Collection”. Collected data were analysed using the built-in function of co-occurrence of all keywords, being plotted in “Network visualization”, “overlay visualization (year)”, and “density visualization” in VOSviewer. Each circle stands for a keyword while its size represents the number of times that a pair of keywords have co-occurred in publications. The legend with different colors stands for the average year of the occurrence of each keyword. (For interpretation of the references to colour in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the Web version of this article.)

Fig. 2

a) Estimated global share of face masks discarded as COVID-waste generated from a given country (Benson et al., 2021), b) Conceptual model of the plastic pollution cycle and the interactions between biogeochemistry, trophic transfer, and human health and exposure (Bank and Hansson, 2019).