Environment, we who fight Marine Litter
Here it is summer with the warm sun and holidays that sweep away stress and bad moods. The beaches of Italy are crowded with “homegrown” and foreign tourists who enjoy the beauty of the blue sea. The important thing, however, is to keep our natural heritage clean and tidy. If, on the one hand, there are dirty tourists who abandon waste as if nothing had happened, on the other hand, there are those who are committed to protecting the beauty of the area.
Like the Greens of Campania , they have decided to give away thousands of reusable waste butts to those who will crowd the beaches of the Region. In fact, it takes 5 to 12 years to dispose of a cigarette butt and cleaning the beaches of all the cigarette butts left behind every day is an almost impossible task. Thus, Francesco Emilio Borrelli kicked off the initiative “Campania beaches free from cigarette butts” which will start from Giugliano where the representatives of the municipal councilors of Giugliano, Aniello Cecere and Giuseppe D’ Alterio, and the spokesman of the Giugliano area Giovanni Sabatino, have given an appointment to members and sympathizers in Piazza Cristoforo Colombo in Licola mare at 10.30 am.
“We have chosen the coast of Giugliano – explains Borrelli – where, after the distribution of cigarette butt holders, we will also swim because this year the sea water that bathes Giugliano is particularly clean thanks to the work done with the purification plants in the area. The recovery of the Giugliano and Domitian coastline represents a challenge that must be won for the economic and social revival of that area and of the entire region”.
This is not the only initiative of this kind. Legambiente
also fights marine litter with the “Vele spiegate
” project. Through which the association, thanks to a dense network of collaborations, will involve about 400 volunteers over the summer in a citizen science program designed to collect and monitor marine litter in two magnificent national parks: the Tuscan Archipelago Park and the Cilento, Vallo di Diano and Alburni Park. Thanks to the commitment of the volunteers, data will be acquired on the health of our sea. A very high percentage of waste, between 80 and 90%, is represented by plastic as evidenced by the data of Beach litter by Legambiente, which monitored 22 beaches last month in Campania for a total of 78 thousand square meters, detecting an average of 7 pieces of waste per meter for a total of 15,201 pieces of waste. Plastic accounted for as much as 77% of the total waste collected, followed by glass/ceramics (8.8%) and paper/cardboard (5%). In the Salerno area, 15 beaches were investigated where 6,085 beached waste were registered.
In Campania, the volunteers will be engaged for a month along the Cilento coast, from Agropoli to Pollica-Acciaroli, from Marina di Camerota to Sapri. Floating waste will be collected along the routes of the journey, as well as beached waste that will also be analyzed and cataloged by quantity and type. The scientific interest of the project also lies in the investigations focused on remote beaches, where public access is reduced. The data collected will be put online and will contribute to international research on marine litter.
Another interesting initiative in favor of the fight against plastic that pollutes our seas comes from Greenpeace , which has launched Plastic Radar, a service to report the presence of plastic waste on beaches, on the seabed or floating on the surface of the Italian seas. You can participate in the initiative by sending reports via Wathsapp to the Greenpeace number +39 342 3711267. Through the plasticradar.greenpeace.it website it is possible to consult the results and find out which are the most common types of packaging in Italian seas, which product categories they belong to, whether they are made of disposable or multi-purpose plastic and from which Italian seas the highest number of reports comes.
An important signal also comes from the Ministry of the Environment with a bill to allow the recovery of plastic in the sea, with the involvement of fishermen, “a great resource of the country”. This was announced by the Minister of the Environment Sergio Costa to raise public awareness of the importance of protecting the sea. “In the coming weeks, I plan to introduce the first law on the sea, which talks in particular about plastic in the sea,” explained Costa, “following the line indicated by the EU directives, which we intend to anticipate in Italy. But this is not a law against anyone – explained the Minister – we will include a first step on the circular economy, so we will focus on the reuse of plastic. Entrepreneurs will be on our side, while protecting the environment“.
As is now well known, we at VMEngine care about the health of our seas, beaches, public greenery and the air we breathe. In fact, we stopped using single-use plastic a long time ago. In our own small way, therefore, we put into practice daily gestures that take care of the most precious resource we possess: the Environment.
