Face-mask littering is as grim as it gets

WHAT’S the deal with face-mask littering? Tánaiste Leo Varadkar is calling for a €50 fine for not wearing one in required settings, but he should have widened this to penalties for chucking them on the pavement.

No form of litter is acceptable, but mask littering is off-the-chart offensive. Like used underwear, needles and condoms, discarded personal protective equipment (PPE) is right up there with the items nobody wants to scoop up.

I want to believe it’s unintentional because the alternative – that people are coldly dropping their masks and not giving a hoot – is too depressing to contemplate.

One factor that suggests we’re doing it unawares is the fact it’s not just the blue disposables that are lying about; there are snazzy masks too. It seems unlikely that people would shell out time and money choosing a fancy number, or a preppy plain one, only to throw it away.

I’ve seen people wander around with them on wrists – I have done this myself – and you can see how they might slip off really easily.

Perhaps when people emerge from the supermarket and rip them off, they carelessly stuff them in their pocket and they fall out. Or maybe they’ve floated out of the side pocket of an open car door.

There could be an angry subconscious motive, our powerlessness over Covid19 may be causing us to rebel and ‘accidentally on purpose’ drop them.

Then again, it could be that the pandemic has us in a state of permanent distraction, because there does seem to be more litter in general.

Could masks be the new entry in that weird category of things destined to go astray, like socks and gloves? Because I really can’t accept people could be so obnoxious as to drop them intentionally.

It’s a raised middle finger to the environment because disposable masks are produced from hardy stuff such as polymers, which can take hundreds of years to break down.

It’s baffling to me why anyone outside a medical setting would use the disposables.

An article this week in the scientific journal Nature reported that an international research team estimated that surgical and comparable cloth masks have the same level of effectiveness in protecting the wearer.

At least you no longer see many discarded plastic gloves, as in March and April, before we knew they were not effective in daily life.

I am noticing litter lately because our local Brownie unit has no venue so instead is meeting up once a month for hikes or a local clean-up.

Our first outing is on Sunday and

Dublin City Council has kindly delivered 13 litter-pickers, gloves and bags. I’m one of the two leaders and, like a good Brown Owl, did a recce of our route and was surprised by all the masks lying about. They are definitely the new plastic bags in the rubbish charts.

Bernie Lillis, litter prevention officer with Dublin City Council, tells me they have noticed this too and she would like people to think before they drop anything, and PPE in particular.

“It’s grossly irresponsible for people to drop face masks. We would ask people to make sure they dispose of them appropriately,” she says.

The HSE advises we carry a ziplock bag for our used mask or throw the disposable ones immediately into a closed public bin or your general rubbish bin at home because they cannot be recycled.

To raise more awareness, perhaps we need an advertising campaign that puts dropped masks on an equal level with letting your dog do its business and leaving it for somebody else to step in.

Because having masks strewn about is not good for the environment, or anyone’s morale.