Università degli Studi di Siena Comunicati stampa

27/03/2018
SIENA - Plastic waste in the Mediterranean Sea: safeguarding protected marine areas
“Plastic Busters MPAs", a new international project with an important European financial contribution, to assess the impact of plastic and to adopt common policies
The alarm raised by scientists for the very high plastic pollution levels in the Mediterranean is taken up by European institutions, with the objective of reaching common legislation policies and of activating concrete actions to mitigate this phenomenon: Interreg Europe, the European Fund for regional development, has approved and granted important funding to the "Plastic Busters MPAs" project, dedicated to safeguarding protected areas of the Mediterranean, to assessing the impact of plastics and microplastics on marine fauna, to defining common actions for the fight against pollution.
The project stems from Plastic Busters, an initiative of the University of Siena and of its marine ecology and environmental ecotoxicology researchers, coordinated by Professor Maria Cristina Fossi, who have been devoted to scientific research, to raising public awareness and to institutional networking for protecting the Mediterranean from plastic waste for many years.
“Plastic Busters MPAs", a recently launched four-year project involving 15 partners from Italy, Spain, France, Greece, Albania, Croatia and Slovenia, has obtained funding of over 5 million Euro, is under the scientific responsibility of the University of Siena and is coordinated by ISPRA, Istituto superiore per la protezione e la ricerca ambientale (National Environmental Protection Agency). This is the first project on a Mediterranean scale according to which European Union countries and some applicant states join forces in order to tackle the problem of marine waste with a coordinated approach. The Mediterranean is in fact one of the world’s areas most affected by plastic waste, as has recently been published in international scientific journals by the researchers involved in the project. The impact on marine fauna, including on endangered species, is not yet fully known, even inside the protected areas, and the prevention and mitigation measures are still insufficient.
“Plastic Busters MPAs” will be implemented within the framework of the Med-Interreg project (2014-2020) and will have the task of diagnosing the impact of plastics and microplastics on biodiversity in the protected marine areas, of defining and testing the surveillance, prevention and mitigation measures of marine pollution from plastic waste, of developing a common framework of actions, policies and legislation. The objective also includes defining a joint Governance Plan, through a participatory approach and a concrete commitment of the protected marine areas involved in the project, in order to extend the identified good practices to all the protected marine areas in the Mediterranean. The final part of the project will aim to provide recommendations and strategies for managing marine plastic waste to policy makers.

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Since 2012, the Plastic Busters project of the University of Siena, under the aegis of the UN’s international Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN), has been promoting environmental monitoring and awareness-raising activities concerning the problem of microplastics in the Mediterranean Sea, in collaboration with Ispra and with the support of the Union for the Mediterranean (UfM), the intergovernmental entity which brings together 43 countries. With the consent of all member states, in 2016 the UfM conferred the “label” to Plastic Busters, the award which places it among the strategic projects for developing the Mediterranean area.
Information concerning the Plastic Busters project, coordinated by Professor Maria Cristina Fossi, is available here