In March, as parts of America and Europe shut up shop, some 2.5bn customers are reckoned to have visited Amazon’s website, a 65% increase on last year. Lockdowns have also led to a boom in e-commerce. Staggering though such figures are, personal protection is only part of the story.
According to a forecast from Grand View Research, the global disposable-mask market will grow from an estimated $800m in 2019 to $166bn in 2020. Much of that increase is down to demand for products designed to keep covid-19 at bay, including masks, visors and gloves. Data are hard to come by but, for example, consumption of single-use plastic may have grown by 250-300% in America since the coronavirus took hold, says Antonis Mavropoulos of the International Solid Waste Association (ISWA), which represents recycling bodies in 102 countries. Whether on the foreshore of the Thames or the deserted beaches of Soko, the planet is awash with pandemic plastic. Like a stubborn weed, the masks had returned. Having cleaned it up, he went back four days later. But what he documented that day made news across Hong Kong: 70 surgical facemasks on a 100-metre stretch of beach. Mr Stokes says he is all too accustomed to finding the jetsam the modern world throws up, such as plastic drinks bottles and supermarket carrier-bags. Soko’s beaches are where OceansAsia, the conservation organisation he runs, sporadically records levels of plastic pollution. In February, half a world away, Gary Stokes docked his boat on Hong Kong’s isolated Soko Island. Since the coronavirus reached Britain the mud has sprouted a crop of latex gloves.
She can tell the time of year, she says, just by the type of rubbish she has to sift through: champagne bottles during the first week of January footballs in summer. Ms Maiklem spends her days on the river’s foreshore foraging for history’s detritus, from Roman pottery to Victorian clay pipes. THE THAMES has always been a reflector of the times, says Lara Maiklem, a London “mudlark”.