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Cited by 308

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 113 of the 113 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

The COVID-19 pandemic face mask waste: A blooming threat to the marine environment

Open access
Dharmaraj, Selvakumar, Ashokkumar, Veeramuthu, Hariharan, Sneha, Manibharathi, Akila, Show, Pau Loke, Chong, Cheng Tung, Ngamcharussrivichai, Chawalit·2021·Chemosphere

Abstract

Recently, the COVID-19 disease spread has emerged as a worldwide pandemic and cause severe threats to humanity. The World Health Organisation (WHO) releases guidelines to help the countries to reduce the spread of this virus to the public, like wearing masks, hand hygiene, social distancing, shutting down all types of public transports, etc. These conditions led to a worldwide economic fall drastically, and on the other hand, indirect environmental benefits like global air quality improvement and decreased water pollution are also pictured. Currently, use of face masks is part of a comprehensive package of the prevention and control measures that can limit the spread of COVID-19 since there is no clinically proven drugs or vaccine available for COVID-19. Mostly, face masks are made of petroleum-based non-renewable polymers that are non-biodegradable, hazardous to the environment and create health issues. This study demonstrates the extensive use of the face mask and how it affects human health and the marine ecosystem. It has become a great challenge for the government sectors to impose strict regulations for the proper disposal of the masks as medical waste by the public. Neglecting the seriousness of this issue may lead to the release of large tonnes of micro-plastics to the landfill as well as to the marine environment where mostly end-up and thereby affecting their fauna and flora population vastly. Besides, this study highlights the COVID-19 spread, its evolutionary importance, taxonomy, genomic structure, transmission to humans, prevention, and treatment.

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Crossref · 10.1016/j.chemosphere.2021.129601

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Metadata

Authors
Dharmaraj, S., Ashokkumar, V., Hariharan, S., Manibharathi, A., Show, P. L., Chong, C. T., & Ngamcharussrivichai, C.
Venue
Chemosphere
Publisher
Elsevier BV
Published
2021-06
Volume
272
Pages
129601
ISSN
0045-6535 (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W3119003908
Cited by
308
References
113
FWCI
14.26
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
green

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: The COVID-19 pandemic face mask waste: A blooming threat to the marine environment. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1016/j.chemosphere.2021.129601
The paper
Dharmaraj, S., Ashokkumar, V., Hariharan, S., Manibharathi, A., Show, P. L., Chong, C. T., & Ngamcharussrivichai, C. (2021). The COVID-19 pandemic face mask waste: A blooming threat to the marine environment. Chemosphere. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chemosphere.2021.129601

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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.