... Given that masks, gloves, and wipes are not typically reused, combined with concerns about their post-use contamination, large numbers of these items began to proliferate on the streets and beaches of populated areas. Proliferation of discarded PPE following the onset of the pandemic have been documented in many countries including, but not limited to: Canada (Ammendolia et al., 2021); Peru and Argentina (Dela-Torre et al., 2021, Chile (Ardusso et al., 2021;Thiel et al., 2021), Mexico (Kutralam-Muniasamy et al., 2022, Colombia and Argentina (Ardusso et al., 2021), Brazil (Ardusso et al., 2021;Ribeiro et al., 2022), Poland (Nowakowski et al., 2020), Italy (Binda et al., 2021), Turkey (Akarsu et al., 2021), Greece (Kouvara et al., 2022), Egypt and Saudi Arabia (Hassan et al., 2022), Nigeria (Fadare and Okoffo, 2020), Ethiopia (Aragaw et al., 2022), Persian Gulf (Akhbarizadeh et al., 2021;Mohamadi et al., 2023), Caspian Sea (Hatami et al., 2022;Mohamadi et al., 2023), Africa (Benson et al., 2021), Kenya (Okuku et al., 2021), Morocco (Haddad et al., 2021;Mghili et al., 2022), Bangladesh Abedin et al., 2022;Monolina et al., 2022), India (Gunasekaran et al., 2022), Indonesia (Cordova et al., 2021), Hong Kong (Dybas, 2021), Philippines (Sajorne et al., 2022) and Fiji (Chand et al., 2021). ...