Photo credits: Bluenet Project
team
AQUA-LIT continues participating in workshops and meetings around Europe disseminating its first results achieved after one year of work. This time, AQUA-LIT was invited to the Bluenet Workshop, that took place in Bizkaia (Spain) on December the 10th 2019
Bluenet is a project co-funded by the European Maritime and Fisheries Fund that aims at reducing, by the end of 2020, the marine litter from sea-based sources (fishing and aquaculture) and from the SE Bay of Biscay (Euskadi, Spain) by 20-40%. To achieve it, 5 actions are being developed, mainly focused on preventing and reducing the litter and, furthermore, establishing a plan for collection and management of these items addressed to fishers and aquaculture operators.
In this framework, the workshop was organized to facilitate the knowledge exchange and the brain-storming among multiple initiatives (that are taking place mainly in the region of Euskadi but also in other areas of Spain) related to the management of marine litter including marine litter items collection, reuse and recycling of multiple materials and, therefore, to the circular economy.
AQUA-LIT took part in the workshop as an innovation project focused on the prevention of marine littering from aquaculture activities. Maria Vidal Rigo from IEO, one of the AQUA-LIT partners, presented a summary of the main objectives of the project, the results, and a description of the stakeholder engagement activities carried out till now.
The importance of involving stakeholders from the whole aquaculture chain was specially highlighted, and it was showed how AQUA-LIT, although is a project with an European scope, has a worldwide applicability vocation, by creating a sustainable toolbox of innovative ideas and methodologies that will be available for all the stakeholders.
Participants were invited to the coming soon Mediterranean Learning Lab, that will happen on the 4th of February 2020, and encouraged to visit AQUA-LIT website, download the deliverables and share their ideas through the “Have your say in AQUA-LIT” survey.
Both AQUA-LIT and Bluenet projects are strongly related and they can feed and enrich each other in identifying methodologies and measures to improve the management of marine litter from aquaculture.
Photo credits: Bluenet Project team