Every year, 8 million tons of plastic waste end up in the ocean. 

A Sea Without Waste project had two main objectives: on one hand, to involve schools from different municipalities along the Spanish coast in initiatives aiming to preserve suitable environmental conditions for local beaches, and on the other, to create educational and informative material on ocean litter for primary teachers and students.

How?

To reach these objectives, and bearing in mind that the project was focused on primary schools, in 2017 a protocol was created to clean beaches (to pick up and classify ocean litter) by adapting the beach cleanup protocol already in existence from the Barcelona Convention (PNUMA/PAM).

Educational materials were also drawn up, both for students and for teachers, in order to facilitate work on this subject in schools. These educational materials explain what ocean litter is and help to understand the problems it causes.

Moreover, the campaign “Adopt Your Beach” was created, in order to encourage participant schools to take action by “adopting” their local beach. Schools helped their Town Hall to manage the beach, organizing periodical clean-ups with students (following the protocol) and suggesting ideas to improve the environmental condition of the beach in question.

10 primary schools along the Spanish Mediterranean coast participated in the project, with a total of 932 students who picked up over 30 kg of litter during 10 beach clean-ups. Thanks to the support and commitment of teachers, students and city halls, the project helped to raise awareness of ocean litter and to improve the environmental condition of the selected beaches.

All educational and informative resources created for the project are on the website and can be downloaded, free of charge.

This project was supported by the Fundación Biodiversidad (Ministry of Agriculture and Fishery, Food and the Environment andbyECOEMBES.