PROJECT OVERVIEW

our ambition

Today’s oceans contain roughly 25 million tons of plastic waste. Over 90% of all marine litter is located on the seafloor, making it difficult and expensive to collect. Every year, up to 600,000 tones of macroplastics and microplastics enter European seas. While plastic pollution affects all seas across Europe, the Mediterranean is the most affected sea, due to its semi-enclosed basin and the intense human activities taking place on the surrounding coastal areas.

SeaClear2.0 will develop an integrated approach to address the full cycle of marine litter in a way that will help meet the objectives of the Mission to restore, protect and preserve the health of our oceans, seas and waters by 2030, in the context of the Mediterranean sea basin lighthouse of the European Commission.

AT A GLANCE:

SeaClear2.0 Objectives

1.
Reduce pollution from litter in the Mediterranean and beyond

SeaClear2.0 will adopt a full-cycle strategy when it comes to addressing marine litter: Reduce, Analyze, Restore, Collect, Repurpose. We will begin by identifying site-specific solutions for preventing and minimising marine litter. Before collecting any litter, we will evaluate its potential impacts on the seafloor and marine wildlife. Collected litter will be sorted and analysed and its valorization, through recycling or repurposing, will be assessed.

2.
Develop and demonstrate the innovative SeaClear2.0 solution

The SeaClear2.0 systems consists of a team of collaborative, heterogeneous robots for in-situ mapping, detection, classification, and collection of marine litter from the seafloor and sea surface. Our team will build on the system that was developed in the EU-funded SeaClear project, to develop a more advanced system of autonomous robots with enhanced sensing that will be able to collect heavier litter items (up to 250 kg) from greater depths (up to 100m), and with greater autonomy.

The SeaClear2.0 system components will be tested at three pilot locations, Ashdod (Israel), Venice (Italy) and Hamburg (Germany), whereas the entire system will be demonstrated in Dubrovnik (Croatia), Marseille (France), and Tarragona (Spain).

As we want to maximise our work’s impact, we will design an action plan and roadmap to scale and replicate our work through associated regions.

3.
Demonstrate the collaborative potential between the SeaClear and SeaClear2.0 systems

A key goal of SeaClear2.0 is to demonstrate the dual-system collaboration between SeaClear and SeaClear2.0. This will allow more efficient marine litter identification and collection, as well as the collection of heterogeneous litter (larger and smaller items) from diverse seafloor environments.

The collaborative aspects between the SeaClear and SeaClear2.0 systems will be tested during a full size demo in Hamburg (Germany).

4.
Engage stakeholders, transfer knowledge and empower citizens

SeaClear2.0 will help create an ocean literate society by providing opportunities for citizen and other targeted stakeholder engagement in a series of activities and events planned at the project’s demonstration and pilot sites. These will include cleanups for marine litter identification, collection, and monitoring through contests and digitalized gamification, workshops and exhibitions, calls for actions, and outreach events.

Communities of Practice will be set-up at each of the demonstration and pilot sites. These Communities of Practice will include the main stakeholders at each site, those that can affect and be affected by the SeaClear2.0 project activities.

5.
Outline policy recommendations and develop a plan for taking forth SeaClear2.0

SeaClear2.0 will contribute to better policy-making on two levels. At the local level, Communities of Practice and other stakeholders at the pilot and demonstration sites will be engaged, through participatory processes, in the identification of solutions for the minimization of site-specific marine litter. At the EU level, policies will be mapped and analysed to identify barriers, opportunities, synergies and coherence problems, and identify key factors and interactions that can support the uptake and wider use of our innovative solution.

Information and data from the demonstrations and pilots, including the views of the engaged stakeholders, will be used to develop a feasibility study and a business plan that will facilitate the exploitation of the SeaClear2.0 system.

PROJECT OVERVIEW

SeaClear2.0 Objectives

ABOUT SEACLEAR2.0