Opinion | Hong Kong needs better answers to pandemic-driven surge in plastic waste

I recently counted seven separate pieces of plastic in a single Covid-19 rapid antigen test (RAT). All school staff, teachers and students are required to take daily RATs, as are elderly care home staff. Every inbound traveller must take 11 RATs and five PCR tests.

More than half a million RATs are taken every day in Hong Kong, generating more than 3.5 million pieces of plastic from the test kits. In April this year alone, 60 million RAT kits and 60 million KN95 masks were distributed to the city’s 3 million households. The numbers boggle the mind.

It is no wonder the Covid-19 pandemic is also known as the “plastic pandemic” as the single-use plastic waste generated is truly astounding. Why the love of plastics? They have an excellent strength-to-weight ratio and are durable and inexpensive, but where does all the waste go? For plastics that are not appropriately disposed of and recycled, it becomes mismanaged waste that is discharged into the environment.

According to Hong Kong-based marine conservation organisation OceansAsia, around 52 billion disposable face masks were produced globally in 2020. By the end of that year, an estimated 1.6 billion disposable masks made their way into the oceans – that is more than 4 million per day. The throwaway mask pollution in the first year of the pandemic was equal to 7 per cent of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a mass of plastic debris that floats in the Pacific Ocean.

A more recent report from November 2021 by researchers from Nanjing University and the University of California San Diego was even more grim. They found that 193 countries had generated more than 8 million tonnes of pandemic-associated plastic waste through to August 2021. This included personal protective equipment, plastic gloves, masks, face visors, packaging and so on. More than 70 per cent of the global discharge was from hospital waste.