Public-Private Partnerships To Reduce Riverine Pollution

The proposed action aims to pursue two different and parallel outcomes: on one side launch and validate technology-based integrated solutions to identify, collect and valorize riverine litter; on the other, validate Public Private Partnership as a viable business model to restore and protect our waters from the dangers of plastic pollution, enabling circular loops and waste-to-value paths.
The first part of the action will involve clustering and technology integration activities to create a pilot system which combines River Cleaning barriers, monitoring technologies and automatic waste selection based on image and soundwave recognition of litter. River Cleaning barriers are innovative non-permanent, modular barriers running on passive energy from the water streams and will be tested out in ongoing Horizon Europe projects such as REMEDIES and INSPIRE.
In the first step we aim at building a “river depollution” cluster by onboarding machine learning, data collection and automation-focused SMEs as strategic partners to upgrade current River Cleaning systems; the integrated solution will be able to stop litter, analyze it, collect the data and separate it within a collection cage: the aim is to reduce sorting and transportation costs, raising the overall value of waste and the percentage of recyclable material.
The second part of the action will launch a stakeholder engagement and technology uptake campaign together with Auxilia Foundation: we will show how the Public-Private Partnership model can be a virtuous model to fund projects, magnify impact and deliver value to communities, public authorities, research institutions and corporates.
This part of the action will focus over the organization of a pilot (technologies set up for a prolonged period, creation of data repository, communication plan) and the dissemination of its results among the selected national stakeholders from Italy (Regions, Ministries, River Basin Agencies, Associations representatives, companies). Impact value propositions will be crafted for each category, in order to highlight the benefits of a synergic cluster action.
The ultimate goal of this action is to stimulate efforts in restoring rivers and oceans from all sides using technology-enabled and impact-driven models based on economic sustainability and profitability.