It’s been a difficult balance to strike: protecting communities and healthcare workers from COVID-19 with personal protection equipment (PPE) like face masks, rubber gloves, and isolation gowns—while preventing a waste crisis from the abundance of single-use plastic.

The world has been using 129 billion masks and 65 billion gloves every month since the pandemic’s onset, and an estimated 4.5 trillion masks in 2020 alone. Each day, about 54,000 tonnes of PPE waste travels to landfills, often winding up in the ocean, where sea turtles choke on gloves because they resemble jellyfish, one of their food sources.

Researchers at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) in Australia have spent more than a year testing the possibility of reusing PPE—in concrete.

The building material is versatile, but it has poor tensile strength, meaning it can break easily under tension. Reinforcing concrete makes it more durable and more flexible, which the scientists found they could achieve using the plastic in PPE.

They tested masks, gloves, and gowns—each of which is composed of different materials. Nitrile gloves are made of a synthetic rubber polymer; masks contain polypropylene fibers; and gowns have a blend of polyethylene and polypropylene, both plastic polymers (the latter of which can take up to 25 years to break down in a landfill). All three successfully strengthened concrete in testing.

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