MEDASSET and Healthy Seas have joined forces in the battle against marine litter. To this aim we have established partnerships with three fishermen associations in Attica who have began collecting their useless nets so they can be processed and reconstituted to make ECONYL ® yarn, a high-quality raw material that can be used to create new products, such as socks, swimwear or carpets.
In May, we organised two diving actions at the shipwreck Pylaros, close to the Alimos coast, to collect “ghost” nets. In total we will conduct 10 or more dives in different locations throughout Greece, in cooperation with Innerspace Explorers Greece diving club, where we aim to retrieve a good amount of discarded fishing nets.
In May, we presented the Healthy Seas initiative in a special workshop that we co-organized in the context of European Maritime Day 2015, titled “Innovative business models for marine litter in Europe”. The workshop highlighted the importance of solutions that are integrated into scalable business models involving cross-sector collaboration, which help to prevent and minimise marine litter in Europe.
The Healthy Seas initiative provides an excellent case study of the circular economy at work, while clearly demonstrating that indeed “waste is too valuable to be wasted”.
Read more about the “Healthy Seas” Initiative here and at www.healthyseas.org
