Wasting Away During Quarantine
The coronavirus’s impact has been hard on people and the environment
By Izzy Teitelbaum
The choice between public safety and the planet’s safety is made every day. It’s a constant balancing act, and we’ve been thrown off balance by a pandemic. COVID-19 forced people into lockdown, which at first sounded like a break for the planet. A moment for mother nature to take a deep breath and relax. This meant better outdoor air quality, less household food waste, less energy emissions, and a decrease in deforestation. However, these things did not come without a cost.
We’ve regressed back to a single-use nation. This temporary wastefulness made sense when COVID-19 first hit fast and furious. Fear caused people to lose sight of the greater good and instead to fret over their own mortality. The nation reacted by plastic wrapping itself to safety. People were no longer allowed to use their reusable bags in stores, individual pieces of food were being prepared in plastic, and with takeout orders increasing, so did the accompanying single-use silverware and packaging. For self-serve stores to be able to open back up, such as fro-yo places, each customer has to wear a new pair of plastic gloves when creating their treat. The amount of waste keeps climbing higher.
The pandemic has been present in the United States for almost eight months, which is a significant amount of time for our new habits and protocols to have an environmental impact. The waste from plastic products will outlast the fleeting environmental benefits observed during the early stages of the pandemic. This isn’t even taking into consideration all the medical waste that’s a necessity for health workers. Medical waste and hazardous disinfection routines especially have increased, creating more ecological risk from harsh chemicals. The World Health Organization increased its request for PPE by 40%. China had nearly six times the medical waste during the peak of the pandemic than they did before.
People are hard on the planet, our growing habits and needs are a disruption. The sheer number of people is too much for it to keep up with. The denser the population, the quicker a disease spreads. Problems tend to arise when there’s overcrowding, which is often linked with lower-quality and less hygienic living conditions. This is the ecosystem's way of saying, “Stop having so many goddamn children.” Our planet is not equipped to handle so many humans’ needs. We caused climate change, and, in turn, climate change created more favorable conditions for the spread of diseases. Rapid deforestation has forced animals to migrate toward living closer to people, and along with animal agriculture breeding animals like crazy to keep up with human demands, the spread and mutation of diseases can occur.
No one is to blame for this knee-jerk reaction, and with essential workers putting themselves at risk, the best form of protection is necessary. A big problem is that plastic has become the cheap option due to the oil market’s collapse. Besides scaling back waste in the medical community, it’s important that non-essential workers and others get creative quickly to minimize any more harmful effects of COVID-19. The pandemic has been hard on everyone, so the relationship between our efforts to be eco-friendly and our need to maintain a safe environment has become wildly unbalanced. They’re often portrayed as separate issues when, in reality, they’re deeply intertwined.
People have been forced to get creative, helping to reduce the stress on the planet any way they can think of. The rise of reusable masks is one of the most common ways people have chosen to combat new waste. Buying cleaning spray instead of wipes, refilling hand sanitizer containers at a local brewery, wearing washable gloves, and buying local to reduce transportation waste are all good steps. We just need to remember that they are little steps towards greater change. We need to take more drastic actions, individually and through legislation, for long-term change. We have to emerge stronger instead of reverting back to a majority of people either unaware or ambivalent about our planet’s health.
We should be listening and learning from COVID-19. When we get a vaccine distributed, things need to do more than go back to normal. The constant prioritization of convenience in the name of human health over environmental health cannot sustain us. All of these plans for an eco-friendly future in 2050 seem like a pipedream, too far away to save us. It’s too vague, too distant, and not urgent enough to counteract the population's effects on the environment. We need real, difficult, and substantial change for our planet to remain a beautiful place to live.