Commercial face masks, usually made of polypropylene (PP), are very challenging to sustainably recycle, motivating exploration of alternative polymers for melt blowing. To determine which polymers can be melt blown into nonwoven materials suitable for masks, we examine the viscosity and measure melt-blown fiber diameter and mask filtration efficiency of nonwoven mats of polypropylene- PP, polylactic acid-PLA, polyethylene-PE, polyamide-PA blown from a commercial-scale melt blowing machine. We thereby find a correlation between aerosol filtration efficiency of meltblown fabrics and mean fiber diameter irrespective of melt material. Extensive study on PP and PLA meltblown mats shows that a double-layer filtration efficiency of more than 95% is achieved for a mean fiber diameter of 1-2 micron, while filtration efficiency drops to less than 10% for a mean fiber diameter of 8 microns and above. In particular, we find that production-scale meltblown nonwovens using low molecular weight PLA can achieve filtration efficiency comparable to N95 masks. For the first time, we also report the effect on PLA melts of commercial additives that reduce viscosity leading to easy processing. Computational modeling of the melt-blowing process indicates that the stresses exerted on the polymer melt are insufficient to induce notable viscoelastic effects, validating the use of a simple Newtonian constitutive equation for modeling purposes. A one-dimensional fiber model was used to predict the mean fiber diameters of nonwovens produced in melt blowing under different operating conditions for the different polymer melts. These findings highlight the potential of biodegradable polymers like PLA to replace PP in sustainable, high-performance filtration applications.