Venice Lagoon Plastic Free organized a four-day immersive educational experience in Venice, structured around three main events: an international training on the monitoring, removal, and circular economy of marine litter; the fifth edition of the international workshop dedicated to the same topics; and the twelfth edition of the international monitoring and clean-up at the WWF oasis on the Lido of Venice and the Sant’Alvise shoal in the historic center of Venice, held in connection with World Environment Day.
The first two-day training, held on May 30th and 31st, kicked off in Saint Mark’s Square, in the heart of Venice. We received participants from various organisations in Europe, partners of the INTERREG IPA ADRION JOINABLE project, namely: AMAP (Italy), UoM (Montenegro), UIST (North Macedonia), ETMI (Albania), iED and the Municipality of Punat (Croatia), lead partner of the project.
The training began with each organisation presenting its plans for waste removal from lakes, rivers, and beaches, both in the short and long term. Venice Lagoon Plastic Free then provided the theoretical basis and methodological elements, highlighting commonalities and differences between beach clean-up and beach monitoring activities. A beach clean-up aims to remove waste, making the area clean, as its name suggests. Beach monitoring, on the other hand, has the objective of collecting data from the waste removed and therefore has more rules to follow and time occurrences that can be compared over years and seasons in line with JRC protocols and codification standards..
The participants learned how to organise both events, including all the dos and don’ts for each.
The first day ended with VLPF introducing three applications.
The app by Remedies, used for beach monitoring, presents different categories to classify the marine litter found stranded on shorelines. The SeaClear app is used for beach cleanups. It employs a gamified technique, among the available options, allowing volunteers to form teams and set up various challenges, which also facilitates the computation of the plastic footprint. Lastly, EOL Boat Buster was introduced, which has an entirely different goal: to identify “end of life” boats that can be found abandoned in nature or elsewhere. As VLPF came up with the initiative to remove these boats from its city’s lagoon, the NGO wanted to extend the tool and know-how to other sub-basin territories, thanks to the JOINABLE project.
The second day of the training employed a learning-by-doing approach. The participants were taken to a beach in Pellestrina, an island in Venice, and performed beach monitoring with VLPF. The waste collected was taken to our office and analysed by the participants using the Remedies app. This allowed them to take a hands-on approach and enabled us to see how much they had learned. The results were encouraging.
The diversified training activities initiated by VLPF have successfully shared our know-how as well as the digital tools for monitoring marine litter. Moreover, these activities have enabled the creation of a new community of users of these methodologies and systems. The ultimate goal of the training is to develop and implement a joint action plan to monitor and reduce pollution in our seas and inland waters within the Adriatic-Ionian area, in line with the objectives of the European Union’s Ocean Mission.