Strengthening citizen science partnerships with frontline sanitation personnel to study and tackle plastic pollution.

ABSTRACT: The COVID-19 outbreak has boosted demand for and use of personal protective equipment (PPE) and other single-use plastics, adding to the environment's already high levels of plastic pollution and endangering biota. Estimating the relative abundance of PPE wastes that end up in the environment is crucial and has remained a challenge for COVID-19 researchers. Citizen science has been utilized in recent studies to monitor and collect data using volunteers, and it has proven to be a valuable approach even in difficult situations. The expansion of citizen scientific participation groups is important in light of the growing anthropogenic impacts of plastic pollution. To date, frontline sanitary personnel are often overlooked and underutilized in a citizen science perspective, yet they serve crit

SUBMITTER: Shruti VC 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9422775 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature