Environmental Advances 4 (2021) 100042 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Environmental Advances journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/envadv The release process of microfibers: from surgical face masks into the marine environment Francesco Saliu a,∗ , Maurizio Veronelli b , Clarissa Raguso a , Davide Barana c , Paolo Galli a , Marina Lasagni a a Earth and Environmental Science Department, University of Milano Bicocca, Piazza della Scienza 1, 20126 Milano, Italy b RDLAB137 srl Via Solari, 32 - 20144 Milano, Italy c Loestrasse 63, 7000 Chur, Switzerland a r t i c l e i n f o Keywords: Microplastics Contamination Marine litter Plastic soup Facemask COVID19 a b s t r a c t Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the use of disposable face masks has been adopted worldwide as a precautionary measure to slow down the transmission of the virus. This has determined an unprecedented rise in the production of these protective equipments, and unfortunately to a new form of environmental contamination due to the improper disposal. To provide a preliminary estimation of the release of microfibers by a surgical mask dumped in the marine environment, we carried out artificial weathering experiments. Results indicated that a single surgical mask submitted to 180 hours UV-light irradiation and vigorous stirring in artificial seawater may release up to 173,000 fibers/ day. Moreover, SEM and micro-FTIR analysis carried out onto surgical masks collected from Italian beaches highlighted the same morphological and chemical degradation signature observed in the masks subjected to the artificially weathering experiments, confirming the risks of a similar microfiber release into the marine environment. 1. Introduction The ubiquitous presence of plastic in the marine environment is one of the unfortunate signs of our current era (Waters et al., 2016; Efimova et al., 2018). The adverse effect of this form of pollution has been widely investigated in the recent literature (Browne et al., 2008; Cole et al., 2014; Fossi et al., 2012; Gall & Thompson, 2015, Galloway et al., 2017; Rist et al., 2018; Saliu et al., 2021; Wright et al., 2013; Taylor et al., 2016). After the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic (Elachola et al., 2020), disposable face masks have turned from a specific tool designed for healthcare professionals (National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) 2020) to a generalized measure to mitigate the propagation of the virus (World Health Organisation (WHO) 2019; Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) 2021; Esposito et al., 2020). As con- sequence, common people who do not have proper skills regarding han- dling and disposal has started to use masks for everyday life, and this has led to an unprecedented increase in production, estimated between 2,4- 52 billion pieces in the 2020 (Eurorostat 2021; Phan & Ching, 2020; Prata et al., 2020) that is added into the global plastic production estimated at 368 million ton in 2019 (PlasticEurope, 2020(Plastics - the Facts 2019), causing around 8 million tonnes of plastic lost from the world’s coast annually (Jambeck et al., 2015). ∗ Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: francesco.saliu@unimib.it (F. Saliu), davide.barana@hotmail.it (D. Barana). Unfortunately, many surgical masks wasted have already turned into a new environmental threat for the marine environment, since their presence in the marine litter have already been reported by several en- vironmental organizations i.e. the World Wildlife fund (WWF), Green- peace, and Marevivo (COVID-19 2021). In the scientific literature, the possible risks posed by face masks as a source of microplastics and/or nanofibers have already been highlighted by several authors (Okoffo & Tadele, 2020; Aragaw 2020, Fadare et al., 2020). The need to carry out research to assess the comprehensive data on their abundance and thorough estimation of the related environmen- tal risks, comprised possible impacts onto marine wildlife, was also high- lighted (Aragaw, 2020). At the present time, no data regarding the number of microfibers released by the surgical masks into the marine environment are avail- able. For this reason, here we provide a first and prelimary evaluation, obtained by submitting commercially available surgical masks to arti- ficial aging experiments, including UV irradiation and application of mechanical stress into artificial seawater. Moreover, we analyzed these samples together with masks collected from Italian beaches by means of infrared spectroscopy (IR) and scanning electron microscopy (SEM), aiming to provide comparison of the degradation extent with. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envadv.2021.100042 Received 28 February 2021; Received in revised form 4 March 2021; Accepted 4 March 2021 2666-7657/© 2021 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)