Organisation requesting funding:

PER LA MAR VIVA (PLMV) was born after carrying out a field based research project from August 2017 to January 2018 and after gathering the information of all the waste being produced by the local businesses and civilians in the area of Ciudadela harbour. After his research PLMV approached all the relevant stakeholders (Town hall, police, environmental matters representative, restaurant and bar owners, cleaning service companies, etc…) to let them know about the amount of kilos of plastic waste that were being “thrown” into the sea per year just in ciudadela harbour and tried to find/propose solutions. PLMV has proposed specific solutions to each organisation depending on their responsibility and involvement, but the association has realised that a large part of making a change is getting to young people and getting them to change their way of behaving. PLMV a also aims to educate public administrations, business, private organisations and individuals in order to reduce any waste ending up in Menorca’s waters via introducing excellent waste management systems and this way contribute to the reduction of plastics being found in the sea and on our coastline.

Issue of Concern being addressed:

Plastic marine waste and Marine Conservation. PLMV located different points of plastic accumulation in the coast and organised its first volunteering event of PER LA MAR VIVA association (in terms of receiving people from other parts of the country that specifically come to Menorca to spend their holidays doing volunteering activities). The project was implemented on the north coast of Menorca in coastal areas of Ciutadella and Ferrerías.

Value of Grant:

The project carried out 5 cleaning activities around the coastline with 12 young volunteers with an approx. cost of: 2.379,32€.

Project Overview:

The volunteering project was carried out with a group of young people (a group of 12) that belong to an Esplai in Barcelona who spent their holidays volunteering for PER LA MAR VIVA, collaborating with the environment and participating in PLMV coastal cleaning activities. PLMV put together a 5-day plan to address the plastic waste being accumulated on the north coast and the volunteers spent 5 days cleaning a part of the coast, analyzing the waste being collected and clearing up nearly 1 ton of plastic (910kg’s)

The project is related with PLMV previous projects as it has both an educational component, allowing young people to participate actively in the marine environmental theme, but also contributing to his coastal cleaning strategy.

Project collaborations:

Ferreries town Hall supported with plastic bags and food for the volunteers.

General project objective:

To engage young people to keep cleaning beaches and coastal areas during their holidays supporting the work that PLMV started last spring and was strengthened thanks to the MEPF support to PER LA MAR VIVA – coastal cleaning project and educational project. Specifically, an exhaustive cleaning of the designated spaces, previously identified, to prevent plastics ending up in the sea due to storm or strong winds. Another project component is to continue collecting data on the effectiveness of the current coastal cleaning service

Specific objectives:

The project focuses on continuing to share PLMV experience, knowledge and informative documentary with young people in Menorca but with the added value that in this case they were a group of volunteers from Barcelona. This was the first volunteers project PLMV has run and they used it as a pilot to then set up a wider strategy focusing on this for next summer (potential summer camps for volunteers, etc…)

The project has another component related to raising awareness towards the understanding of consequences of young people actions when it comes to waste management and might be a complement of the wider project carried out which is liaising with local business, public administrations and government bodies to address the big problem of plastics ending up in the sea and along Menorca’s coastline.

The third project component is to implement of a pilot test for the collection of microplastics with suction pumps.

Project phases:

A one phase project that has been carried out in august.

Chronology:

The overall project was carried out from 3/08/2018 to 7/08/2018 both included.