In May, a French non-profit organization, Opération Mer Propre (Operation Clean Sea), announced that divers had found a large amount of “COVID waste” in the Mediterranean. The trash included gloves, masks, and bottles of hand sanitizer. Joffrey Peltier, who works with the organization, warned that this could be “the promise of pollution to come if nothing is done.” Since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, billions of people across the globe have started using disposable products to protect themselves from the spread of the disease. The organization hopes that this new information will push people to wear reusable masks and swap wearing latex gloves for more frequent hand washing. Similar warnings have been issued by other environmental groups such as Hong Kong-based OceansAsia, which has reported discarded masks washing up on uninhabited islands.
In the beginning of July, China announced the first numbered flood of the Yangtze River for 2020 as inflow of water into the Three Gorges Dam reached 50,000 cubic meters per second. The “No. 1 Flood” came after torrential rains in the region that began in late May. The rains caused flooding that affected the Guangdong, Guangxi, Guizhou, Hunan, Hubei, Jiangxi, Sichuan, Chongqing, and Anhui provinces. As of mid-July, more than 100 people had been killed or were reported missing due to the floods. Tens of millions of residents were affected. Comparisons were made to flooding in 1998 which left more than 3,000 people dead and 15 million homeless and resulted in an economic loss of US$24 billion.
