2021 was the year of the mask - all over the world. After their effectiveness against the spread of Sars-CoV-2 could only be denied if you deliberately bent the facts, they determined the picture everywhere, at the European Football Championship, the Summer Olympics in Tokyo, on the beaches, in the cultural sites that are open again under certain conditions. The US manufacturer 3M ("Post-It", "Scotch") alone, mainly represented in the high-quality mask segment, produced 2.5 billion pieces in 2021, four times as many as in 2019. Of course, that's only a fraction of what the huge Chinese mask industry exported.

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