With the “Catch the Glove” campaign, launched on 3 June, the organisation appeals to the responsibility of citizens to put protective gloves and masks in the garbage containers to protect health and prevent the world's rivers and seas from becoming even more polluted and calls for an urgent plan to manage the waste caused by the pandemic.
The organisation collected images of masks and gloves scattered in various places, which could contaminate people and reach the sea when dragged into rivers, as has already happened in the Mediterranean and other seas around the world, according to the organisation.
Each surgical mask, which weighs about four grams, can take 400 years to degrade, which presents a “very worrying” problem with its widespread use.
WWF fears that the lifting of movement restriction and population confinement measures, especially in the summer, will increase pollution on the beaches, with which turtles, jellyfish and other animals that mistake gloves and masks for food will suffer.
Annually, it is estimated that about 100,000 marine animals die each year trapped, asphyxiated or poisoned with plastic waste.
It also warns that plastic pollution in the seas can reach a critical point if effective measures are not taken and calls for “not one step” to be taken back in the commitments adopted to eliminate disposable plastics in 2021 in Spain.
Not one nation is immune from the unjustifiable release of trash, especially plastics, into the planet's oceans. Ocean-nation cultures, like Portugal, have a great responsibility, to not only refrain from trashing the oceans, but also a moral obligation to speak out against any other nation, organization, business or individual who may use the ocean as a dumping ground.
The environmental association WWF is doing the right thing by sounding the alarm of the new recent wave of medical-waste dumping. With the “Catch the Glove” campaign, they are doing great work. I am happy to read about this in The Portugal News. Good for them, good for us, but mostly good for the oceans and seas.
By Marc J. Moniz from USA on 04 Jun 2020, 02:09
This is so shameful. And no one else to blame !
By Tom Randony from Algarve on 04 Jun 2020, 08:58
To repeat the obvious is tiring! It is unacceptable that populations who say they are deeply concerned about the environment convinced of their greeness and that protest at ani opportunity against climate change engage in such unconscious and unacceptable behaviour! They don't really care about anything else but their umbilical cord! Not even that because they are directly contributing to their own destruction! At the same time they lobby poor politicians and strongly protest against clean, cheap and reliable nuclear power, properly designed pipelines, major infrastructures such as bridges, dams and efficient incinerators of waste plastics. They even pay in the store for the recycling of these items and after don't care if they end up destroying ecosystems locally or far away in the Pacific Ocean! But the responsibility is not so much with individual ignorant, greedy, stupid or unconscious people but mostly with their weak and irresponsible leaders that just care about political correctness, maximizing tax monies, selling of national resources and unrestricted exercise of power! Enforcing a few fair and good laws is for somebody else!
By Tony Fernandes from Other on 05 Jun 2020, 17:25