Taking Turns

Taking Turns (2021) by Elizabeth Solich oil on canvas, mixed media. Face masks and other personal protective items should be placed in lidded bins, so they are disposed of correctly and don't just end up littering our planet. The correct way to dispose of a single-use mask is to cut off the strings and throw them away. Although they are not recyclable, they are better off in the trash than on the ground where they could get caught on or eaten by wildlife. Disposable masks are plastic products, that cannot be readily biodegraded but may fragment into smaller plastic particles, namely micro- and nanoplastics that widespread in ecosystems. The enormous production of disposable masks is on a similar scale as plastic bottles, which is estimated to be 43 billion per month.