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Plastic Pandemic: Another Crisis Made Worse by the COVID Panic

The virus isn’t all that came from China …

The pandemic lockdowns starved more than a hundred million people, drove people out of work and into drugs, alcohol, and suicide, and caused a rise in child marriages – but the bad news doesn’t stop there. A new study shows that masking and other pandemic-related actions have resulted in more than 25,000 tons of plastic waste entering the oceans globally.

According to the study, which was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), 73% of the pandemic-related plastic was medical waste from hospitals – and 72% of the global waste came from Asia, most tracing back to China. The study confirms a forecast that Liberty Nation shared in 2020. The marine conservation organization OceansAsia then predicted that an estimated 1.56 billion face masks would flood the oceans.

As Expected

GettyImages-129368518 river garbage

(Photo by: Citizen of the Planet/Education Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

The PNAS paper calls for better waste management in developing nations. Therefore, it also reaffirms other research that identifies emerging economies as the primary source of ocean plastic, especially China. Only ten rivers, most of them in Asia, are the source of around 90% of river-based ocean plastic pollution. According to The Wall Street Journal, only 1% can be traced back to the United States.

Thus, the increase is no surprise. It confirms that only Western nations currently take environmental concerns seriously. Unlike elusive future climate change, this type of degradation of the oceans is a tangible and measurable problem with detrimental effects on both wildlife and our food sources. There is some evidence that microplastic accumulates in the food chain, ending up in humans with unknown health consequences.

Curious Focus

However, curiously, environmentalists have not spent energy targeting the most significant polluters and sources of environmental degradation. Instead, they have focused on the countries that pollute the least, including the United States. Californians, who are competent at safely handling and disposing of waste, must suffer from a plastic straw ban that will do nothing to improve the health of global oceans.

The same applies to climate change. The largest global emitter of CO2 from coal is China. The communist regime has promised to double its emissions by 2035. In practice, it means that even if the West completely stops all emissions, global emissions will still rise. Nevertheless, when environmentalists target the international community, they mysteriously ignore the main culprit.

Panic Pain?

In its second year, the pandemic is producing increasing evidence that world leaders succumbed to a panic that has caused poverty, starvation, death, inflation, supply chain congestion, and environmental problems that dwarf the adverse effects of the virus. There is, however, little evidence that these self-inflicted damages have caused leaders to reassess their handling of the matter.

~ Read more from Caroline Adana.

Read More From Caroline Adana

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