Our oceans and waters are suffering from plastic pollution, with around 150 million tonnes of harmful plastics already in the water – a figure that is expected to increase by 10% every year. Mission Ocean projects are working to prevent these negative predictions.
INSPIRE, a Mission Ocean project has brought together 26 partners from academia, research organisations, industry and NGOs to develop technologies and solutions for the detection, collection and prevention of plastic waste in rivers. As rivers play an important role in transporting plastic from land to sea, INSPIRE is working to tackle the problems in three steps:
- DETECTION of the plastic pollution present in the river and the riverbank;
- COLLECTION of litter and macroplastics at the riverbank and litter, macro and microplastics in the river;
- PREVENTION of litter, macro and microplastics from entering the river by collecting it from its waste stream before it can enter, and by developing biodegradable alternatives for currently non-degradable polluting products.
The project has established eight use cases across Europe to install and test technologies and measures. These include six river demonstration sites: Danube river (Romania), Douro river (Portugal), Kamniška Bistrica river (Slovenia), Po river (Italy), Rhine river (The Netherlands), Scheldt river (Belgium), two agricultural test sites in Austria and Greece and one festival site in Serbia.
Interested in detecting, collecting and preventing plastic waste from rivers in your region? Apply for the INSPIRE Open Call for early adopters! Local and regional authorities from Associated Regions are invited to apply for funding to scale up and replicate INSPIRE solutions. Applications are open until 29 November 2024! Learn more about the open call here, or watch the recording of a webinar and Q&A session about the call here.