In-No-Plastic

In-No-Plastic (Innovative approaches towards prevention, removal and reuse of marine plastic litter) is a three year EU funded project contributing to the Mission Ocean & waters objectives, in particular to objective 2 through the development and demonstration of nano-, micro-, and macro-plastic clean-up technologies in the aquatic ecosystems.

The approach taken is a combination of social and technical strategies targeting the industrial hot spots through cooling water systems (CWS), harbours, lagoons, shores and shallow seawater. The technical approach consists of comparing the existing plastics removal methodologies with multiple developing technologies at varying testing sites in Europe and in the Caribbean.
The social strategy comprises an incentive-based initiative that relies on a crowdsourcing application. The focus is to get the local population involved by incentivising plastic recovery in return for monetary compensation and other rewards.

Furthermore, In-No-Plastic entails a comprehensive monitoring system to gather data at frequencies of every 6 months for 2 years. This is done to understand the effectiveness of the new technologies and current clean-up approaches both in terms of cutting down plastic presence in the environment and its effects on the marine and local ecosystems. This technical proposal will be a blueprint in establishing a coherent and synchronised system of cleaning, that is scalable and replicable.

Part of the plastic gathered at the demo sites will be treated for reusability by investigating different recycling methods, leading to the inter-connectedness of the processes in acquiring plastic waste and creating circularity in the value chain.

The complementary consortium of 17 partners from 10 different countries, includes 2 research institutions, 2 Government bodies, 4 industry end-users, 2 NGOs, 7 SMEs of which 4 technology and 3 service providers.