Sustainable Blue Economy: a systemic approach to tackle marine litter

Five EMFF projects presented their solutions for preventing, mapping, monitoring, collecting, and recycling marine litter.

On 11 February 2021, 133 participants from 11 countries attended a virtual workshop event on marine litter. The event had three main objectives:

Inform European Commission services of the achievements of the projects;
Raise awareness of the challenges faced in implementing the projects;
Discuss how future policy developments can make use of the projects results.

On the International day of women and girls in science, a women-only panel of coordinators from five EMFF projects presented their main achievements, the challenges they faced and their contribution to the policy and legal framework related to marine litter.

The projects were:

AQUA-LIT, Preventive Measures for Averting the Discarding of Litter in the Marine Environment from the Aquaculture Industry;

Presentation | Video

BLUENET, Creating new life for discarded fishing and aquaculture gears to prevent marine litter generation;

Presentation | Video

marGnet, Mapping and recycling of marine litter and Ghost nets on the sea-floor;

Presentation | Video

NetTag, Tagging fishing gears and enhancing on board best-practices to promote waste free fisheries;

Presentation | Video

OCEANETS, Technological approaches for circular economy solutions in terms of prevention, recover, re-use and recycle of fishing gears to obtain added-value products in the textile industry.

Presentation | Video

The presentations of the projects were preceded by a keynote lecture by François Galgani, from IFREMER, on “Marine litter in Europe: from science to policies”.

Presentation

At the event, as part of the EMFF Trainee Project, a video introducing the concept of marine litter and the activities of the five EMFF projects realised by former EASME trainee Elena Basilio Puig was presented.

Video