In the last 15 years several EU funding programmes have addressed marine litter under different perspectives. The outcome is a wide range of EU research projects and associated results and a newly released Free Litter Toolkit.
The growing amount of litter reaching our oceans is one of the most significant forms of marine pollution, posing threats to both marine ecosystems and human health.
As litter enters the marine environment from land and rivers, and gets to the sea basins of different countries, it turns into a transboundary issue. Therefore, to be addressed effectively, it requires a transnational action involving policy makers and local authorities, researchers, the industry, Non-Governmental Organisations, and civil society.
Being aware of the challenges of marine litter, in the last 15 years several EU funding programmes have addressed marine litter under different perspectives. The outcome is a wide range of EU research projects and associated results.
This important legacy has led to new knowledge and guidance in the form of scientific publications and technical reports, online information products, interfaces and apps for data management, monitoring and modelling tools, protocols and technologies, case studies and awareness materials.
EU projects joining forces on marine litter
The Task Force on Healthy ocean and resilient coasts (Pillar IV) of the Atlantic Action Plan of the European Commission, and the Interreg Atlantic Area project Free LitterAT have launched a collaborative framework to address this issue.
The objective is to engage key EU projects that had delivered or plan to deliver tangible outcomes to help coastal communities and stakeholders to prevent and/or reduce marine litter for litter-free coastal communities.
The full list of projects that joined the initiative can be found at the end of the news.
Marine litter-free toolkit
As a first product of this collaborative initiative, they developed a Free Litter Toolkit to facilitate the access to key projects and associated resources, while also fostering networking and result clustering activities.
The toolkit includes references to selected projects and associated resources that are expected to become solutions to achieve litter-free coastal communities.
To produce the toolkit, European project repositories, databases and related literature were consulted. Selected projects were also approached to join the initiative and to support the identification of their results.