Grant: Research Tools and Instruments

The Canadian perspective on the COVID-19 crisis has brought to light important supply chain and environmental impact challenges facing our country. There is an urgent need to secure enough personal protective equipment (PPE) to protect healthcare providers as well as to protect the public through support of disease prevention practices during the pandemic. We must also find ways to manage the acute disposal problem of millions, even billions, of discarded single-use facemasks. The Government of Canada has recognized the seriousness of these issues in a recent call for compostable disposable surgical masks and respirators. The BioProducts Institute at UBC brings together internationally respected leaders in multidisciplinary bio-based materials research to address one of the most important environmental challenges of our time. In the spring of 2020, our team noticed the buildup of potentially hazardous single-use masks in public spaces, and began to tackle the PPE waste and supply challenges by designing N95 and flat folded surgical masks that could be made entirely from renewable Canadian wood fiber sources, such as wood fibers and lignin. The success in the prototyping that followed indicated great promise and a realistic solution to producing enough PPE for our country, that could be made-in-Canada. Most importantly, such a solution is cost effective and will cut down on plastic waste and reduce the impact on our environment through use of these new compostable facemasks. To create these environmentally friendly solutions, it is important to be able to: 1) accurately and reproducibly measure the filtration effectiveness and benchmark the materials against accepted national and international standards; 2) have the ability to rapidly process facemask samples for measurement to compare the effectiveness and suitability of different filtration media and compositions; 3) provide HQP with an important training opportunity and skills experience that will support them as future career scientists. Our team has already obtained research funding to support this project and completed much of the preliminary materials work but the key element preventing us from further developing fully bio-based masks is the ability to access the necessary filtration metrics. The PALAS Respiratory Mask Tester with Bipolar Discharge System and Mas-Q-Check Protective Mask Tester requested in this proposal will allow us to accelerate our efforts and deploy facemasks with proven performance and proper certification. It will also allow us to refine and expand on current prototypes to design the most effective PPE for Canadian applications.