Discarded single-use face masks have become a common sight in public streets across the world. But what if they could actually become part of the street?

A team of scientists in Australia has a plan for repurposing single-use face masks to make the base used for roads and pavements, a new and low-carbon strategy to reduce the booming problem of pandemic-generated waste.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, bans on single-use plastic only recently implemented across the world, have been reversed in order to protect medical staff and the general population from the risk of infection.

The result has been a dramatic explosion of medical plastic pollution. It's been estimated that if the global population were to adhere to a standard of one disposable face mask per day, the pandemic could result in a monthly global consumption and waste of 129 billion face masks and 65 billion gloves. This number, calculated in June 2020, is expected to be much higher now, after mandatory face mask policies were introduced.

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Based on these figures, the team of researchers in Australia estimates that as many as 6.88 billion face masks are made around the world each day, which are ultimately sent to landfills or incinerated.

In the summer of 2020, many experts and activists were already raising the alarm about the negative impact on the environment of COVID-19 waste disposed of incorrectly. Millions of disposable face masks and gloves have ended up in our streets, parks, forests, rivers and oceans in the past year, contributing to the issues of microplastics in our waterways and harming wildlife.

Polypropylene, a type of plastic present in large quantities in single-use face masks, takes hundreds of years to degrade and releases significant quantities of toxic substances during the process.

Looking at the many discarded face masks on the streets of Melbourne, where the study was based, researchers Mohammad Saberian, Jie Li, Shannon Kilmartin-Lynch and Mahdi Boroujeni had the idea to recycle disposable PPE into material for building roads.

In order to do so, the metal strips and ear loops were removed and the surgical face masks, after going through a disinfection process, were shredded into strips 0.5 cm wide and 2 cm long and then being blended with construction materials. Specifically, they experimented mixing the shredded face masks with processed building rubble or recycled concrete aggregate (RCA).

What they found is that the face masks were a perfect binding material, helping the rubble particles to connect and improving the flexibility, strength and resistance of the construction mix.

"The face masks have some amazing properties, including high-tensile strengths and ductility," explained Jie Li, discipline leader (civil structures and materials) at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) University, Australia. 

"The masks could provide higher strength and stiffness and more flexibility to the base and sub-base of roads. We can build better and stronger roads by the adoption of face masks in road layers."

The group's findings show that recycling single-use face masks to make pavements or roads is not only a feasible solution to pandemic-generated waste, but could also be beneficial to the construction sector, reducing costs and the need for virgin materials.

"Our study showed that using the recycled face mask material to make just 1 kilometer of a two-lane road would use up about 3 million masks, preventing 93 tons of waste from going to landfill," said Li.

The Australian team now hopes to partner with local governments or companies interested building a first real-life road prototype.