Table of Contents

The challenges of Covid-19 pandemic on improving plastic waste recycling rates

Sustainable Production and Consumption
Received 9 April 2021, Available online 6 July 2021.
Norman Ebner
Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, University of Oxford, South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3QY, United Kingdom

1. The impact of Covid-19

• The surge in medical waste: face masks and plastic gloves
• The boom in online shopping and food-takeaway: packaging
• The set-back on the bans on single-use plastics

2. System dynamics
   Fig. 1. Casual loop diagram depicting the dynamics between oil price, plastics production and plastic waste recycling industries.

Minimising the present and future plastic waste, energy and environmental footprints related to COVID-19

Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews
Jiří JaromírKlemeša
Sustainable Process Integration Laboratory – SPIL, NETME Centre, Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, Brno University of Technology - VUT Brno, Technická 2896/2, 616 69, Brno, Czech Republic
Received 15 April 2020, Available online 27 April 2020

1. The composition of increasing plastic demand during the covid-19

The plastic demand in the medical sector to help in combating the COVID-19 including the face shield (PP), gown (LDPE), vinyl gloves (PVC), disposable bag, tube, masks (plastic sheet and non-woven fabric) etc. (from WHO)

Changes on the waste amount and composition trigger a structure change in waste management system

The relationship between MSW and plastics waste: treatment capacity change, waste change(decreased solid waste, increased packaging from deliveries and hospital)

The amount of waste threatens to overwhelm existing treatment and disposal facilities, posing the risk of secondary contagion from improper waste management.

2. New challenges in waste management

The source of contaminated waste is not limited to hospitals. Patients with mild symptoms self-isolated at home generate contaminated MSW. This requires a substantial structural change in waste management, from the sorting rules, collection, waste treatment to the safety protocol of the waste collection workers.

• Food containers in Germany, which would normally be classified as recyclable waste, now have to be treated as hazardous waste if there is a risk of contamination with pathogens.

• These precautions stimulates the use of plastic, the generation of mixed waste, and the logistic challenges for waste management systems.

Incineration and steam sterilisation (90 min, 120 °C) are the common pathways for thermal treatment of hazardous medical waste.

The main challenge is that COVID-19 is creating a waste surge that can exceed treatment capacity by a large margin. Whether to utilise the MSW incineration capacity for medical waste in this critical situation remains an open question. In Spain, it is stated that if necessary, cement plants can co-incinerate waste upon request [24]. Norway allows a temporary change in landfill permits and permits to carry waste elsewhere to cope with the medical waste surge [24], if necessary.

3. Scenarios for the future

• Disaster waste management: treatment approaches, infrastructure, capacity (scalability), mobilised/automated (e.g. remote-controlled robots) treatment and collection design, logistics, safety, and regulatory aspects link to the bio disaster response.
• Incorporation of social factors and uncertainties
• Better trade-offs between medical/healthcare plastics and regular single-use plastics

The COVID-19 Pandemic and the Problem of Plastic Waste in the EU

European Research Studies Journal
Submitted 22/07/21, accepted 10/09/21
Bernadeta Baran
Wroclaw University of Economics and Business, Poland

New challenges brought by Covid-19:

1. Extra pressure Leads to inappropriate management strategies, including mobile incineration, direct landfills, and local burnings;
2. Recycling industry was brought to a temporary halt by lockdowns
3. A surge of single-use plastic products (mostly non-recyclable), followed by a growth of municipal solid waste.

Challenges and strategies for effective plastic waste management during and post COVID-19 pandemic

Science of The Total Environment
Received 17 June 2020, Available online 4 August 2020.
Kumar Raja Vanapalli
School of Environmental Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur 721302, West Bengal, India

1. Implications of COVID – 19 on plastic waste generation.

• Food package waste;
• Personal protective equipment (disposable PPE, to protect against the risk of virus transmission);
• Medical packaging waste from both hospitals and households;
• Single-use plastic bags (a shift from re-useable bags due to hygienic superiority);
• Panic buying and online grocery shopping (unnecessary stockpiling);
• Consumer behavioural changes (due to paranoia of viral transmission)

2. Challenges for the current waste management systems

The most extensively used techniques of plastic waste management across the globe are mechanical recycling, incineration, and landfilling.

Ellen McArthur Foundation estimates the global mechanical recycling rates of waste plastics at 16%. In comparison, the remaining waste plastics were either incinerated (25%), sanitary/unsanitary landfilled (40%), or gets leaked into the environment due to mismanagement (19%) as shown in Fig. 3 (Ellen MacArthur Foundation, 2017).

Fig. 3. Trends of plastic waste generation and implications of COVID-19 on existing waste management systems and probable solutions.

Polymer cross-contamination, presence of additives, inorganic impurities, irregular or inadequate segregation at source or during collection, and partial polymer degradation have always been the major constraints for mechanical recycling of waste plastics (Hopewell et al., 2009).

Multi-layered plastics that have low reward to effort ratio in their collection, high pre-processing costs, technological constraints, and weak integral structure (UNEP, 2018)

Moreover, the plummeting of oil prices during COVID-19 caused a dramatic decrease in the value of virgin plastics affecting the competitiveness of recycled plastics in the market (Bell, 2016; Walker, 2020).

Furthermore, shortage of staff due to the fear of viral transmission during the collection and handling of waste plastics and restricted transportation have crashed the plastic recycling industry (B.I.R, 2020).

Incineration is popular in northern Europe for handling MSW (including plastic waste) for its ability to recover energy complementing the energy needs of the market. Some of the developed nations like Sweden, Denmark, and Poland have adopted advanced and improved technology for air pollution control in their ‘waste to energy’ technology for treating waste (Malinauskaite et al., 2017).

Sweden is a very good example in terms of energy output (23%) recovery from both municipal and industrial waste incineration (Ericsson and Werner, 2016).