Air Travel, in the times of Corona is more like a necessary evil. Flying commercial still remains the fastest and the most convenient way to move around, especially after getting habitual of a few hour hops vs an overnighter on the road. We are still arguing that international flights, primarily from hotspots in China and other nations should have been stopped late last year only and saved us the agony of a rising curve that was predicted to flatten. The prudence of that aside, the ability of air travel in carrying the virus has certainly been accepted and has changed the airline industry for good.
Today, taking a flight implies masking up for the cab journey with a topping of gloves and healthy dollops of sanitizer till just the security check. One is then layered with a face shield and if you are unlucky in the middle row, a PPE gown to save you from your neighbours, in the socially cramped economy class. Fear, precaution or just instructions to follow, the feel of flights is history and it has also taken away the oddly satisfying meals and the seriously debatable coffee that kept you up but made the next seat guy snore away.
Emotions are strange chemical reactions. They make seemingly quantized events like going from Place A to B an experience to remember and letting go, a hard choice. The recent take off was ironically a sinking feeling. It was a “Surgical Strike” on the senses with the cabin smelling of strong disinfectant and the crew dressed like surgeons. From being a poly-sensory experience that I was looking for, the flight got downgraded to candy crush and a constant nagging in the head, “are we there yet?” It offends the human ego that nature is indifferent to us. However much we want, the mother elephant and her unborn are not coming back and this virus is not going away. Living with difficult truths, unfortunately, is normal.
Another view on this new reality of protective gear and sanitizing liquids is on the volume of discard these single use items create. Their medical-hazard aside, the pollution side-show itself is a big add, on the plastic choking of the planet. The 170 odd passengers and crew, after taking off from mom’s airport and landing at the son’s airport (Bless their souls. Great leaders), disposed 170 masks, face-shields and about 50 PPE gowns. And this happening with every flight presents a substantial source of the new-normal pollution.
Our country has shown great ingenuity in exponentially increasing the production of PPEs and sanitization chemicals. Currently, PPE manufacturers use materials such as polyester, polyamide, polyethylene and other polymers. As good citizens we may assume that PPEs, being primarily plastic conform to recycling processes, but PPE is not recyclable (with the existing processes) or biodegradable, and it needs to be treated as waste. Sanitization chemicals contain ethyl alcohol, isopropyl alcohol or both to kill bacteria and viruses on hands and surfaces. Alcohols have long been known to kill germs by denaturing the protective outer proteins of microbes and dissolving their membranes. However, the excessive use that we see today needs another look as the solvents are sure to find way into the water systems or even the food chain and may become a concern through bio-magnification.
So, what can we do about the PPE waste issue? Gloves, masks, and wipes are playing a vital role in our lives right now as a way to protect people from contracting and spreading the corona virus. Still, harming our environment and possibly polluting the already endangered water sources should not be a necessary consequence. Sustainability of production, use, discard processes and by-products needs to be the foremost focus in this case. Using biodegradable materials, adding end of service indicators and making multi-use items instead of ‘single-use and discard’ variants, come to mind as options for a better PPE. But these ideas require quite an investment from a manufacturer’s perspective and a deviation of the lowest bidder syndrome from the buyer’s side. The easiest and cheapest way to market is rarely, if ever, the most sustainable way.
An interesting thought here could be the Circular Economy for the PPEs. A Manufacturer-Distributor combine could cater for PPE supplies to major bulk breaking points like airports, hospitals etc and collect the used PPEs and ensure a systematic discard / recycling. It holds value, as the economics of scale will allow investments into retooling of manufacturing processes as well as recycling procedures, leading to an environmentally safer lifecycle for the now inescapable PPE. It is a major change in this recently booming industry as ‘Before-Corona’ the hand sanitizer or the PPE were more of an emergency requirement than a routine and that has brought a whole new scale to fore. We may wish or impose environmental prudence on industries, but realistically, corporate sustainable development is not environmental or ethical but economic; if it fails economically as a business concept, as an engine of innovation, then it fails.
How can you help? Simplify the problem, wipe away the propaganda, listen to experts and use common sense. Wear cloth mask in safer areas, an N-95 mask is not needed everywhere. Use and discard PPE in the proper way and please remember, just because it is from a public dispenser, you don’t need a ‘large’ of hand sanitizer; it’s a different type of alcohol. And yes, please wait for sometime before crushing social distancing as soon as the aircraft lands.
Disclaimer: This was not my flight. Image from Twitter
Take the World Environment Day as an excuse to start. Long after COVID-19 is solved, we still will have to protect the Earth.
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