The COVID-19 Pandemic and Waste Management

Abstract

Waste management has been a great problem globally for at least five decades. Some of the developed countries could initiated certain processes to benefit from the waste. In this way, countries could both got rid of waste and they could exploit from it and used waste in different ways such as heating, recycling, etc. The situation became even worse during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. The COVID-19 pandemic has altered global waste generation dynamics and thus became one of the most important issue for all countries for now and for future. Actually, healthcare waste is all the waste generated by healthcare facilities, medical laboratories and biomedical research facilities, as well as waste from minor or scattered sources. However, during the pandemic, masks, increased amounts of contaminated waste including gloves, other protective equipment, and along with non-contaminated materials, many types of additional medical and hazardous waste are produced. These contaminated wastes not only dirts the environment, but also may cause the pandemic spread. The inadequacies and inefficiencies of current waste management system to deal with the increased dependence on plastic could aggravate its mismanagement and leakage into the environment, thus triggering a new environmental crisis. Therefore, this study will highlights the possible effects of COVID-19 on the waste management and environment.