published this week in the journal "PNAS."The researchers from Nanjing University's School of Atmospheric Sciences and UC San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography noted how much of the plastic waste has come from hospitals, rather than from personal protective equipment and online shopping package material.
They used data from the start of the pandemic in 2020 through August 2021 and found that most of this global plastic waste entering the ocean is coming from Asia."When we started doing the math, we were surprised to find that the amount of medical waste was substantially larger than the amount of waste from individuals, and a lot of it was coming from Asian countries, even though that's not where most of the COVID-19 cases were,".