 "Covid-19 pandemic: The quest for a disposable mask that won't pollute")
Since the beginning of the pandemic, global production of face masks has rocketed to 129 billion a month from just an estimated 8 billion in all of 2019. While they’ve helped protect humans from Covid-19, the masks — which today are mostly made from plastic fibers that can take hundreds of years to disintegrate — are a threat for creatures that dwell in water bodies. Almost 1.6 billion of the face coverings likely ended up in the seas in 2020, based on a conservative assumption by the marine conservation nonprofit OceansAsia.
To address that problem, dozens of manufacturers are working on
