7. Challenges and Strategic Approaches for Waste Management During and Post Covid Pandemic

Covid 19 was one of the most cliff edges turn that the entire world has taken. In the end of the year 2019, the world encountered one of the deadliest pandemics ever that took lives of millions and trillions of people around the globe, which was later called as Corona virus. It not only took lives of people but also had an adverse impact on environment that made emergence of new environmental challenges and deteriorated the existing challenges. One such challenge was solid waste management. With the emergence of pandemic, the medical sector was seen at a chaotic instance. The increase in number of patients hospitalization has resulted in higher solid or biomedical waste production, with addition to that, the use of Personal Protective Equipment also known as PPE kits was at a rapid pace. SARS-COV-2 or the Novel Corona virus had made the entire world to kneel on lockdown situations. This has led to shutting down of hospitality industries affecting restaurants, hotels etc. The entire business came online and the public started ordering food instead of moving out. This has led to an increase use of plastic and polythene for food packaging and other cutlery which is also made of plastics. Ultimately, this has lead to increased pollutants that has also affected the water bodies. These plastics slowly decompose and lead to accumulation of microplastic pollutants in the environment. The ultimate question is leads to the cause of its affect. Here comes the failure of solid waste management system. The waste production that is a result of certain unavoidable environmental havoc is not in our hands. So, we need to have a robust solid waste management system and a well-planned strategic approach to combat environmental issues that could not be avoided and leads to high waste production.