How to make a home made protection mask, against the Covid19 propagation, with a paper towel.

(variant of a mask designed by Daniel Garin, occupational doctor)

Cost price: less than 5 Euro cents!

It's fully Recyclable!

But it doesn't like rain, nobody's perfect ....

Created : 17/04/2020.

Cette page en francais...

Materials:

• A paper towel of dimension 33cm x 33cm (unfolded), not too thin (in my case, 100 towels weights around 300g)
• A metal fastener or a piece of tie wire, about 25 cm long (or a single stranded electric wire of small diameter can do the job.
• 2 rubber bands (picked from bunches of radishes or bunches of parsley for instance)
• Adhesive tape (the occupational doctor used used staples, but adhesive tape is much easier to use): I used this kind of adhesive tape used by painters at the edges of painted places to prevent from paint smudges, because one can easily cut it without scissors

First, unfold the towel and place at the center the metal fastener that you put in place with 3 pieces of adhesive tape: one at the center and two others at the edges.

Fold up the towel around the metal fastener. Then fold it up again like an accordion in 8 parts of equal width, so that you obtain a band, about 2cm wide.

At each end of the band, place a rubber band and fold the paper over it on around 5 millimeters, then fix with another piece of adhesive tape.

Done!

You can then unfod the accordion carefully and place each rubber band around your ears
the metal fastener must be placed on your nose and you must indeed squash it on your nose
to reduce air leaks just below your eyes.

Recycling: normally, such a protective maks must be thrown to a trash after use. And indeed, the greay advantage of this mask is that it's so cheap that you won't hesitate to trash it. However, you can still retrieve the rubber bands and the fastener to recycle the paper towel in a dedicated trash (before that you should keep it untouched in some place during about 12h to ensure that most viral residues on the mask are naturally degraded). Then you can clean the rubber bands and the metal fastener with water and soap (you can also use some hydroalcoholic gel or bleach etc but water and soap are good enough, keep your hydroalcohol gel for situations when you don't have an easy access to water and soap).