MIAMI (WSVN) - More and more people are wearing gloves in the hopes of keeping their hands clean, but the way some are disposing of them is making a dirty mess.
Gloves that have not been properly thrown away are showing up throughout Miami grocery store parking lots.
Miriam Halvorssen, a shopper said, “There’s dirty gloves all over the place.”
“There’s tens, there’s hundreds of them. Look, they’re everywhere you look. There’s gloves all over the place,” another shopper said.
7News cameras captured gloves thrown to the ground and all over grocery store parking lots.
Some have been left in the carts, others are ditched in the shrubs.
Masks are being tossed to the curb as well.
Miami-Dade County Mayor Carlos Gimenez said, “That’s littering for one, so littering is against the law in itself, so that’s the number one thing, but it’s also a health hazard.”
Local leaders are pleading for people to throw out all their personal protection gear in trash bins.
Placing used gloves in the recycle bin is also discouraged, as the items inside them are sorted through by hand, putting workers at risk.
Dawn McCormick of waste management said, “Recyclables are hand sorted at different steps along the process. Our workers are wearing gloves, but we don’t want them coming into any of this, which is really a type of personal medical waste.”
McCormick said it is best to bag your trash containing any protective gear.
It makes it safer for her waste collectors and makes sure none of that used gear accidentally falls out during the trash pick up process.
While there is a right way to throw the gloves out, Dr. Sanjay Gupta also explains there is a right way to take them off.
“So you grab the inside of the glove here and pull it over yourself, and then I grab with my finger here, and I drop that in the dirty area like so,” Gupta said.
While you do not want to throw gloves in the recycle bin, you do want to be recycling paper products like paper products and cardboard. That gets turned into toilet paper, which is not always easy to find right now.
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