THENEWYORKER,M AY18, 2020 15
can also disintegrate into smaller pieces,
which enter the food chain at the very
bottom; a new species of crustacean,
discovered deep in the Mariana Trench,
in 2014, was named Eurythenes plasti-
cus for the contents of its stomach.)
“Those gloves will be very tied to this
moment,” Robin Nagle, an anthropol-
ogist-in-residence at the Department
of Sanitation, said. “It’s heartbreaking.
You are deliberately putting off onto
someone else a potentially deadly haz-
ard.” (Researchers are looking into
whether the coronavirus might spread
through spillovers of untreated sewage.)
In Hong Kong, glove-wearing is less
common, but disposable masks are the
norm. Gary Stokes, a co-founder of
OceansAsia, a marine-conservation or-
ganization, began finding discarded med-
ical masks on beaches about six weeks
after COVID-19 alerts were first sounded.
In New York, the castoffs are just start-
ing to appear. Last week, dozens of gloves
and masks were discovered on the shores
of Jamaica Bay at Canarsie Pier, Rock-
away Community Park, Dubos Point
Wildlife Sanctuary, Floyd Bennett Field,
Rockaway Beach, and MacNeil Park,
and along the banks of the Bronx and
Hackensack Rivers. “These are places
no one goes when it’s cold like this, ex-
cept for a few birders. So they have to
be drifting up,” Alex Zablocki, the ex-
ecutive director of the Jamaica Bay–
Rockaway Parks Conservancy, said, of
the debris.
“The city needs to come up with a
truly innovative campaign against glove
litter,” Enck said. It’s easy for the issue
to fall through the cracks of city bu-
reaucracy. The Department of Sanita-
tion is responsible for street sweeping,
but sidewalk cleanup is the purview of
the city’s individual business-improve-
ment districts. With most businesses
closed, it’s left to people like McKen-
zie to pick up litter.
A pandemic caused by airborne par-
ticles is not the best time for in-your-
face confrontations, but McKenzie is
undaunted. “I haven’t seen someone
throwing gloves in the gutter, but I’d
probably be yelling at them if I did,” he
said, brandishing a new metal grabber
that he had just bought on First Ave-
nue. His original was stolen last week,
from the sidewalk in front of his bar.
—Erik Baard
1
SIDEEFFECTS
THEGLOVECHALLENGE
B
arehanded on a Citi Bike, Ryan
McKenzie, the owner of a NoMad
bar called Patent Pending, rolled through
his hushed East Village neighborhood
on cleanup patrol the other afternoon.
In the early days of the lockdown, many
New Yorkers marvelled at how litter
guy who
thought he
could still
take anybody
the kind
of guy
who loved
to tell
people he
wasn’t afraid
of anything
so it
really shook
me when
he spoke
in a
voice as
small as
my daughter’s
asking me
if he
was going
to die.
There are funny bits, too, like his an-
ecdote about composing a cute text mes-
sage to one of his kids but accidentally
sending it to fifty hospital colleagues in-
stead. “I received almost fifty return mes-
sages of love,” he wrote. “Hope at least
a few actually mean it.”
He wonders how long this hitch will
last, and where the virus might take him
next, as it leaps from city to city. Like
Whitman in the eighteen-sixties, he
thinks about how future generations
might see us. “When I left home,” he
wrote, “I thought about what I would
do when I arrived in New York: treat
the sick and pray for the souls of the
dead and wonder about 100 years from
now, when all of this is just a fairy tale
about death becoming a person who
takes the form of a bat to fly across the
world: the next generations’ story of the
witch that eats children.”
—Mark Rozzo
had vanished from the streets, much as
smog had cleared from the skies above
New Delhi and Los Angeles. But Mc-
Kenzie, after seeing a handwritten sign
on a lamppost which read “Please
Don’t Throw Your Gloves In The
Street,” began noticing them: blue
and purple disposable gloves dotting
sidewalks and tree pits, and swirled by
rain runoff onto sewer grates. Now he
sees them everywhere.
“I’m an ocean guy,” he said. “I surf.
This will all wash out to the bays and,
in time, be distributed all over the world.
These gloves will be in Greenland.” He
added that the city’s Department of
Health and Mental Hygiene recom-
mends frequent handwashing, not
gloves, to the general public. “People
are so selfish and shortsighted that
they’ll turn a health crisis into an envi-
ronmental crisis as well,” he said. “It
drives me nuts.”
Photographs of crumpled, discarded
gloves have been appearing on social
media lately, under the hashtag #The-
GloveChallenge, which was started by
Maria Algarra, the founder of a Miami-
based organization called Clean This
Beach Up. Parking lots are particularly
hard hit; drivers doff their gloves before
getting into their cars. Subway exits are
another hot spot.
The gloves will wind up in water-
ways. Judith Enck, a former regional ad-
ministrator for the Environmental Pro-
tection Agency and the founder of a
nonprofit called Beyond Plastics, said,
“The gloves may be too flimsy for sew-
age-plant screens to catch, and shoot
right by them,” ending up in riverbeds,
and water columns, and on seafloors. Or
they could wash out to sea directly from
storm drains and sewer overflows. Even
before the pandemic, the city’s sewer
system was spending nineteen million
dollars a year to deal with so-called fat-
bergs, caused by the buildup of tons of
personal-hygiene products, condoms,
and wipes (many marketed as flushable).
When the plastic in vinyl and nitrile
gloves gets in seawater, it becomes coated
with dimethyl sulfide from algae and
bacteria, which smells delectable to some
species of birds, turtles, and marine
mammals. Once ingested, the debris—
even biodegradable plant-derived
latex—can obstruct these creatures’ di-
gestive tracts and kill them. (Plastics
