“But if you go into a store and purchase a face mask that’s labeled, saying it meets the ASTM standard, you can understand what you’re getting and that you’re getting a certain level of protection.” “If you go into a store and buy a mask, you generally have no idea what you’re getting,” Dan Smith, ASTM’s vice president of technical committee operations, says in an NBC News article. If a product meets the minimum requirements outlined in the standard, the manufacturer can label the product as such-in that way, the new standards provide a sort of uniform seal of approval that can be placed on products, so that consumers can more easily and effectively evaluate how well a face mask works. While consumers previously had to rely largely on a manufacturer’s claims (if any) about how effective a mask is at blocking potentially disease-causing particles, the new ASTM standards set a uniform measure by which manufacturers can test their products and ensure they meet established standards for effectiveness. The new ASTM International F3502 standard, released mid-February 2021, now provides a validated set of consensus metrics to evaluate the efficiency of consumer face masks. Now, those standards Pfriem and many others worked to develop were finally released by ASTM International, an international standards organization that develops standards for diverse products, materials, systems, and services as a means to ensure technical quality and uniformity. That’s a problem because the effectiveness of masks can range “from 0 to 80 percent, depending on material composition, number of layers and layering bonding,” says Dale Pfriem, president of Protective Equipment Consulting Services and a member of the standards development working group addressing mask guidelines, in a NY Times article. Yet as I noted in a CTT post from last July, despite the vast array of choices in face masks, there is a disappointing lack of information about how effective each of those choices are. Some even offer a dizzying array of options, with widely varying materials, designs, styles, patterns, colors, and intended uses. Shop at nearly any store, whether online or in person, and you’re bound to find face masks for purchase.
Unlike lab supplies, semiconductors, and chicken wings, among many other goods and services over the course of the past year, there’s certainly no shortage of face masks. Face masks are everywhere, and wearing them out in public has become routine for a large segment of the population.
I even recently witnessed a discarded mask blowing across the pavement like a pandemic tumbleweed.
Free face masks are distributed at public places and as promotional items. In the distant past that was one very long year ago, wearing a face mask out in public felt strange in many parts of the world, including in the United States-even though we’ve known for more than a century that face masks are effective at controlling epidemics.įast forward to today, and many of us now have extra face masks dangling from the rear-view mirrors or stuffed into the glove boxes of our cars, hiding in our purses and backpacks, and strewn across our homes.