Management of disposable surgical masks for tackling pandemic-generated pollution: Thermo-acoustic investigations and life cycle assessment of novel recycled building panels

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed people's habits, causing them to use large amounts of disposable items and exacerbating the already existing issue of pollution. One way to reduce the environmental impact of this shift in daily habits is to recycle these items, e.g. surgical masks that are the most common personal protective equipment against the virus, to produce panels for building applications. In this work, both the thermal and acoustical performance of such panels are evaluated using a small and a large scale investigation under real-world conditions. Small scale thermal tests are performed by means of the Hot Disk instrument while the acoustic investigations are performed by means of the impedance tube. Large scale tests are carried out in a reverberation chamber assessing both the heat flow passing through the wall and the acoustic absorption coefficient of the panels. Finally, the environmental impact of the innovative recycled panel is also investigated in a life cycle perspective. Overall, the material behavior scored well on these tests, suggesting that the proposed approach may be a good recycling method.