There is an island in the Venetian lagoon that every summer becomes a sought-after spot for impromptu barbecues, parties with friends, and moments of relaxation in the sun: Bacàn Island. A strip of sand just 250 meters long and ten meters wide, located between Sant’Erasmo and the Lido, it welcomes hundreds of boaters every week. However, at the end of each day of festivities, what remains is far from a convivial atmosphere: empty bottles, shattered glass, trash, and scattered plastic everywhere.
For this reason, on August 4, the Venice Lagoon Plastic Free team returned to Bacàn with a new goal: to clean and restore this stretch of our coastline. Equipped with pickers, bags, gloves, and the SeaClear2.0 Mare Pulito app—developed by VLPF as part of the European HEUROPE project under the Ocean Mission—our volunteers filled 13 bags of 110 liters each, collecting as much as 95 kg of waste in just a couple of hours of intense work over a few dozen meters. Of this, 14.9 kg was plastic (equivalent to 41% of the per capita plastic consumption in Europe) and 80.35 kg was mixed non-plastic waste, largely made up of dangerous glass fragments of various sizes from bottles deliberately broken and abandoned.
The volunteers’ commitment contributes to a broader goal: to recover 20,000 kg of plastic along Mediterranean coasts as part of the European HEUROPE REMEDIES campaign.
Bacàn is not just a stretch of sand: it is a vital habitat for seabirds such as the little tern and Kentish plover, for colonies of crabs and shellfish, and for seagrass meadows that shelter seahorses and juvenile fish. Removing marine litter from nature wherever possible is a valuable contribution to safeguarding an extraordinary ecosystem.
Here, however, lies a hard truth: volunteers, whether individuals or organized groups, cannot entirely counter the impact of widespread practices involving littering and the degrading use of our waters and seas—they can only mitigate the damage. It is not up to volunteers but rather a daily mission for every citizen and public institution to safeguard and protect our cultural and natural heritage and our biosphere.