“You need to dispose of them somewhere safe”: Covid-19, masks, and the pit latrine in Malawi and South Africa

The ongoing Covid-19 pandemic has generated an immense amount of potentially infectious waste, primarily face masks, which require rapid and sanitary disposal in order to mitigate the spread of the disease. Yet, within Africa, large segments of the population lack access to reliable municipal solid waste management (SWM) services, both complicating the disposal of hazardous waste, and public health efforts. Drawing on extensive qualitative fieldwork, including 96 semi-structured interviews, across four different low-income communities in Blantyre, Malawi and Durban, South Africa, the purpose of this article is to respond to a qualitative gap on mask disposal behaviours, particularly from within low-income and African contexts. Specifically, our purpose was to understand what behaviours have arisen over the past year, across the two disparate national contexts, and how they have been influenced by individual risk perceptions, established traditional practice, state communication, and other media sources. Findings suggest that the wearing of cloth masks simplifies disposal, as cloth masks can (with washing) be reused continuously. However, in communities where disposable masks are more prevalent, primarily within Blantyre, the pit latrine had been adopted as the most common space for 'safe' disposal for a used mask. We argue that this is not a new behaviour, however, and that the pit latrine was already an essential part of many low-income households SWM systems, and that within the Global South, the pit latrine fulfils a valuable and uncounted solid waste management function, in addition to its sanitation role.