The project specific objectives

Creating a concept of personal responsibility for marine litter issues among all target groups, spreading the adoption of good practicies

No solution for reducing marine litter can be realized without involving those who live or benefit from land and coastal areas. Therefore, one of the specific objectives of the project is to develop a comprehensive cross-border campaign aimed at reducing the production and dispersion of marine litter by informing, educating and raising awareness of selected target groups, as well as expanding the adoption of good practices. The campaign will address tourists and local communities with a special focus on the children, strengthening the understanding of marine litter issues and engaging in the implementation of effective solutions. The educative approach to responsible behaviour in the coastal area, scientifically developed, will provide significant changes in behaviour that will help address the issue of reducing and preventing marine waste

Moreover, fishermen will be selected as key target group for ML and ALDFG related management, thus developing communication materials specifically conceived in close collaboration with fishing sector representatives from the very early development stage.

To reduce Marine Litter on Adriatic sea-floor by involving the fisheries sector and FLAG-s and  providing innovative tools that will support implementation of Fishing-for-Litter practice and data collection

Sea floor represents one of the main sinks for litter in the marine environment, acting both as a secondary source for other environments and as “hidden” source of microplastics. Dedicated cleaning actions in this compartment are very expensive and time consuming, but fishermen during their own activities can recovery remarkable litter quantities due to “by-catch” together with fish and other edible marine organisms. So this project objective aims to improve the effort made during De-Fish-Gear of collecting marine litter from the seafloor with the help of fishermen. Data about quantities, distribution, typology, polymeric composition and degradation conditions will be collected in order to provide useful information for policy makers and scientists about potential sources, dispersion and microplastics generation processes. The involvement of the fisheries sector and the Fisheries Local Action Groups (FLAGs) in these scientific activities related to marine litter monitoring will create a positive two-way communication between scientists and productive sectors, which will help the development of further joint policies and initiatives concerning marine environment management. Based on this the project will provide the third specific objective

-Innovative tools that will support implementation of fishing-for-litter practice and data collection.

The Fishing-for-Litter Implementation Status Map is meant to be a supporting decision tool for national and regional level policy makers and authorities, which will report the status of all Fishing-for-Litter initiatives along the Adriatic coastline of Italy and Croatia: existing relevant legislations, administrative and/or legislatives concerns, logistic barriers and adopted/tested solutions will be analysed in detail and compared for evaluation. The project will also develop and test the employment of an user-friendly Android Application for on board data collection of collected Marine Litter through tablets or smart phones. The Application is meant to facilitate data entry directly by the fishermen during fishing on board, and will allow to record pictures of marine litter collected for further detailed offline visual evaluation, imaging, and data collection. Furthermore, the project will provide detailed information about typologies and amounts of the collected marine litter during Fishing-for-Litter activities in the form of scientific reports. This will provide an additional tool to decision makers, proposed as a characterization protocol, for the future planning of managing this peculiar waste category, also in view of assessing and studying its potential entry into the urban or industrial waste recycling cycle.