Sweden

Marine Litter is one of the largest emerging environmental challenges and needs to be tackled at global, regional and national level. The plastic associations in Europe are increasingly engaged in protecting the marine environment and encouraging stakeholders from industrial, political, scientific, non-governmental and social spheres to act together to preserve the oceans and coastal areas. With this in mind, we want to address how the plastics industry and its full value chain can support and contribute to the development of action plans against marine litter on regional and local scale.

Well aware that the majority of litter has its origin on land, the associations focus on knowledge transfer for better waste management and promote a ban of landfilled plastics by 2025. Besides, they support beach clean ups, fund research projects on sources and impact of plastics waste on the marine environment, run programmes to prevent pellet loss and contribute to many initiatives which raise citizen awareness.