Occurrence of COVID-19 personal protective equipment (PPE) litters along the eastern coast of Palawan Island, Philippines

Microplastics in surface water of Laguna de Bay: first documented evidence on the largest lake in the Philippines

“…The same study also revealed that the dominant microplastic shape is fibershave, consistent with our findings. Moreover, it can also be implied that this microplastic sources are from disposable face masks (DFM) (Sajorne et al 2022). The dominant color blue in this study was also one of the primary colors of the fabrics used to make DFMs.…”

“…Apart from personal cares, polypropylene was also used to make protective masks, with 20% of commercially available masks made of polypropylene (Ellison et al 2007). The abundance of polypropylene in this study can also be linked to the use A) and its composition in different sampling of protective masks as an infection control measure, which was common in East and Southeast Asia at the start of the COVID-19 and eventually in the world during 2020 and 2021 (Worby and Chang 2020;Sajorne et al 2022). The majority of the microplastics released from the face masks were medium-sized polypropylene fibers derived from nonwoven fabrics.…”

“…Additionally, the abrasion and aging caused by wearing face masks increased the release of microplastics, particularly medium and blue microplastics (Chen et al 2021). In the Philippines, 377 items of face masks were collected along the eastern coast of Palawan (Sajorne et al 2022). Additionally, disposable masks made with a density of 0.014 items/m 2 were observed in Davao Gulf in Mindanao (Abreo and Kobayashi 2021).…”

“…It has been identified as an emerging issue that may impact biological diversity and human health alongside climate change (Blettler et al 2017). The number of data in the Philippines on plastic pollution in freshwaters is limited when compared to studies on marine ecosystems, even though pollution in both ecosystems is comparable (Peng et al 2017;Superio and Abreo 2020;Inocente and Bacosa 2022;Sajorne et al 2022). Requiron and Bacosa (2022) studied macroplastics in Pulauan River, Dapitan City, where a total of 1,636 macroplastics items were identified for 10 days of observation.…”

Density variability of COVID-19 face mask litter: A cautionary tale for pandemic PPE waste monitoring

“…In short, among studies with mean face mask densities between 0.01 and 8.0 × 10 −3 m −2 , those data sets having higher mean densities also displayed correspondingly higher variability about those means. Secondary analyses on density variability within individual studies could be performed on 24 sets of data presented in 18 papers ( Akhbarizadeh et al 2021 ; Ammendolia et al 2021 ; De-la-Torre et al 2021 ; France 2021 ; Haddad et al 2021 ; Rakib et al 2021; Thiel et al 2021 ; Abedin et al 2022 ; Amuah et al 2022 ; Cueva 2022 ; De-la-Torre et al 2022 ; Gunasekaran et al 2022 ; Hassan et al 2022 ; Kutralam-Muniasamy and Shruti 2022 ; Mghili et al 2022 ; Ribeiro et al 2022 ; Sajorne et al 2022 ; Tesfaldet et al 2022 ). In all cases, various diverse measures of data variability, such as standard deviation (SD), standard error (SE), SD range, boxplot range, overall range, unspecified error bar range, were found to be positively correlated with mean densities, with significant relationships (Spearman's rank correlation coefficients) existing in fully 15 of the cases ( Fig.…”