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Graphical abstract The outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic has created havoc all across the globe causing exponential casualties and tremendous health and economic loss. With increasing COVID-19 cases, the amount of biomedical waste has increased manifolds making more people vulnerable to the pandemic. The developing and underdeveloped countries are already facing the challenges of waste management, and the waste generated during the pandemic scenario has added to the already existing challenges. The improper waste management practices need to be corrected; otherwise, the world will be facing a new disaster that could be termed as ‘waste disaster’. The increase in COVID-19-associated waste (CAW) quantity and their availability in the environment will result in their easy approach to other organisms, which will possibly increase the potential risk of food chain contamination. Some of the countries have already started to make backup plans and are struggling to overcome the ‘waste disaster’. In light of the limited knowledge available on the mutational properties and possible hosts of this newly emerged COVID-19, there is a great demand to have an efficient strategy to prevent the environment from further contamination in India. The necessity of the prevailing time is to create a more efficient, automatic, mechanized, and well-modified waste management system for handling the present situation and delaying the projected waste disaster in the near future in the era of COVID-19. The article aims to address the issues that originated from waste discharges, their potential sources along with possible sustainable solutions. Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11356-021-15028-5.

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Acute (14 DOE) and chronic toxicity (56 DOE) experiments were conducted to compare the lethal and sub-lethal effects of chlorpyrifos and dimethoate on earthworms (Eisenia fetida). Earthworms were cultured in test soil (agricultural soils + cow dung) spiked with various concentrations of these two organophosphorus pesticides of different half-life. The determined effects were avoidance response, biomass change, growth inhibition, mortality, biomass gain per unit feed, cocoon and hatchling production. The resulted order of effects for acute and chronic toxicity exposure periods for E. fetida was dimethoate > chlorpyrifos. The reported median lethal concentration (LC50) in present study was 17.45 and 228.06 mg kg-1 dry test soil for dimethoate and chlorpyrifos, respectively. Growth inhibition was more critically influenced in dimethoate as compare to chlorpyrifos. Rather than lesser growth inhibition in chlorpyrifos, cocoon and hatchling production is influenced greatly at higher concentrations. The cocoon and hatchling production is significantly affected at lower concentrations of dimethoate. All the tested parameters were found to be dose dependent. The present results showed that even a small concentration of dimethoate is potentially dangerous to earthworms than higher concentrations of chlorpyrifos. In comparison the chlorpyrifos was found safer than dimethoate at sub-lethal concentrations for the development and reproduction of E. fetida. Our study provides a clear insight of different antagonistic effects of two organophosphate pesticides with different half-life.