1 . People are increasingly wearing gloves and masks in public, in order to protect themselves and reduce the spread of COVID-19 (新冠病毒). Obviously, though, those gloves and masks need to come with proper disposal (处理) directions.

To bring awareness to the current problem, Algarra started a campaign , TheGloveChallenge. “If you see a glove, snap a shot,” Since launching the campaign on March 23, Alagarra said they’ve received over 700 pictures from people all over the United States and in other countries including Italy, Spain, Portugal, France, Canada and Japan.

Everywhere you look in America, it seems, there are discarded gloves and masks in streets and parking lots, left behind by people who couldn’t be bothered to find a nearby trash bin. It got so bad in New York City over the weekend, that Ryan McKenzie, who lives in Manhattan, began cleaning it up. “I couldn’t believe what I saw so I went to the store and bought a grabber to pick them up. It’s hateful and needs to be brought to people’s attention. "

After receiving so many reports of gloves and masks left behind in Parsippany, New Jersey, the local police department issued a warning: “ Clean up and properly deal with your used gloves and wipes. If you do not, you can be charged and fined up to $ 500.”

Of course, it shouldn’t take a heavy fine to encourage people to clean up after themselves. There are quite a few reasons why leaving your gloves behind is among the worst things you can do during this pandemic. If the used gloves have the virus on them, you could infect essential workers (一线工人). The concern that led you to put on gloves in the first place shouldn’t be reserved for you and your family; you should be just as concerned about others getting corona virus, too.

2 . You’ve heard that plastic is polluting the oceans — between 4.8 and 12.7 million tonnes enter ocean ecosystems every year. But does one plastic straw or cup really make a difference? Artist Benjamin Von Wong wants you to know that it does. He builds massive sculptures out of plastic garbage, forcing viewers to re-examine their relationship to single-use plastic products.

At the beginning of the year, the artist built a piece called “Strawpocalypse,” a pair of 10-foot-tall plastic waves, frozen mid-crash. Made of 168,000 plastic straws collected from several volunteer beach cleanups, the sculpture made its first appearance at the Estella Place shopping center in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

Just 9% of global plastic waste is recycled. Plastic straws are by no means the biggest source (来源) of plastic pollution, but they’ve recently come under fire because most people don’t need them to drink with and, because of their small size and weight, they cannot be recycled. Every straw that’s part of Von Wong’s artwork likely came from a drink that someone used for only a few minutes. Once the drink is gone, the straw will take centuries to disappear.

In a piece from 2018, Von Wong wanted to illustrate (说明) a specific statistic: Every 60 seconds, a truckload’s worth of plastic enters the ocean. For this work, titled “Truckload of Plastic,” Von Wong and a group of volunteers collected more than 10,000 pieces of plastic, which were then tied together to look like they’d been dumped (倾倒) from a truck all at once.

Von Wong hopes that his work will also help pressure big companies to reduce their plastic footprint.