301 - Earth Day: Why COVID-19 Has Caused an Increase in Ocean Pollution
Public Health On Call
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
4.6 • 644 Ratings
🗓️ 22 April 2021
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
COVID is creating massive environmental issues such as the 1.56 billion face masks that entered the oceans in 2020 alone. Teale Phelps Bondaroff, the Director of Research for Oceans Asia, talks with Stephanie Desmon about how improperly discarded PPE to a massive rise in the production of single-use plastics are setting the world significantly back in controlling its problem with microplastics and pollution.
KEYWORDS: environmental health; policy
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Season 3, a Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. |
| 0:12.3 | I'm Josh Sharfstein, Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement, and a former secretary of Maryland's Health Department. |
| 0:19.6 | Our goal is to bring scientific evidence |
| 0:22.4 | and experience to the public health news of the day through informative interviews with scientists, |
| 0:27.8 | community leaders, policy experts, public health officials, clinicians, and more. If you have ideas |
| 0:34.4 | or questions for us to cover, please email us at public health question at jhhhu.edu. |
| 0:41.1 | That's public health question at jhhu.edu for future podcast episodes. |
| 0:47.5 | Hi, I'm Lindsay Smith-Rogers, producer of Public Health On Call. |
| 0:51.4 | Today, Stephanie Desmond talks to conservationist Teal Phelps |
| 0:54.8 | Bondrov about the damage that COVID-19 has done to the oceans. They discuss how discarded face |
| 1:00.7 | masks are ending up as added plastic pollution and how efforts to reduce single-use plastics |
| 1:06.4 | such as bags and straws are being put on hold because of the pandemic. Let's listen. |
| 1:12.0 | Teal Phelps Bondrov, thanks so much for joining me. Great to talk to you. So we're going to |
| 1:17.5 | talk today about ocean pollution and really the increase in ocean pollution that we're seeing because |
| 1:23.0 | of COVID-19. I hadn't thought that there was a connection, but there seems to be one. Could you talk |
| 1:28.1 | about that a little for me? Yeah. So I'm the director of research for Oceans Asia. We're a marine |
| 1:33.9 | conservation organization based out of Hong Kong. And last February, so it's been a full year, |
| 1:39.4 | which is quite a long haul here. But at the of last february we started finding masks on our |
| 1:45.3 | test beach we have a beach in the remote islands and the soco islands which is south of landau and hong |
| 1:49.9 | hong and we were doing regular biweekly plastic surveys and we started encountering face masks |
| 1:55.3 | and we're not talking about one or two we're talking about like dozens of face masks my colleague |
| 1:59.2 | collected 70 face masks across a hundred |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.