Masks are everywhere in Germany. Let’s assume that each of us 83 million well-behaved Germans uses a fresh surgical mask every day. A vacuum-sealed pack of 50 takes about one litre of space. That’s 50,000 masks per cubic metre, and 1,660 cubic metres of masks per day - or around 600,000 cubic metres per year.
A TEU (Twenty-foot Equivalent Unit) container can take 33.1 cubic metres, so you need more than 18,000 of them per year. That’s just fine for the largest container ship in the world, Evergreen’s Ever Ace, that can carry 24,000 TEUs (which is around four times the volume of Noah’s Ark):
Yes, its older sister, the Ever Given, would do as well (with 20,000 TEU capacity) but we don’t want to run out of masks because the damn thing gets stuck somewhere again, do we?
So the largest container ship in the world has to do one trip per year just to supply Germany with masks (which are being produced in China, of course). Won’t someone think of the cliiimate?
Homework: if we all sent our used masks to the Bundesumweltministerium (ministry for environment and stuff), how long would it take until their head quarters are filled to the top?