INSPIRE's main objective is to contribute to the drastic reduction of litter, macro and microplastics in European rivers in a holistic approach, by bringing together 20 technologies and actions for: DETECTION of the pollution present in the river and at the riverbank, COLLECTION of litter and macroplastics at the river bank and litter, macro and microplastics in the river, PREVENTION of litter, macro and microplastics to enter the river by collecting it from its waste stream before it can enter the river and by developing biodegradable alternatives for currently non-degradable polluting products, to avoid they will further be used and arrive in the river as litter. Six use case are defined in INSPIRE to install and test the technologies and actions, to model the processes related to the water purification activities, to obtain 7 well defined solutions at detection, collection or prevention level and combinations thereof. The technical feasibility is backboned by a techno-economical analysis with the development of business cases for the solutions, action plans towards upscaling and replication and together with mapping and modelling all elements are brought together to develop a Master Plan for tackling the challenges of the mission and contributing to the objectives of the mission. The INSPIRE project will be very visible due to its well developed dissemination and communication plan and strategy for community engagement. Apart from the general dissemination and communication tools and activities, specific activities will be setup on festivals, promoting 100% biodegradable products as a result of INSPIRE. INSPIRE's consortium is composed of 26 partners with complementary expertise and a good balance of academia, industry, communication specialists and soft skills organisations is obtained, who all together will work towards the target of having a number of successful solutions that can find their way to the market and put INSPIRE on the radar.

The RIVER CLEANING Project aims at introducing a groundbreaking concept for capturing plastic litter from rivers with a 95% of efficiency. Annually, about 1,700,000 tonnes of plastics are dispersed in seas, or even up to 8,000,000 tonnes, according to other estimates. Rivers are therefore acknowledged as responsible for about 80% of the whole ocean pollution. Plastic waste represents a pervasive environmental pollutant since its recalcitrancy and the environmental persistence. Plastic waste can indeed affect the seas and oceans life, until causing up to 100,000 marine mammals death every year, while microplastics contamination is proven to cause several diseases and long-term persistence in living tissues until reaching humans. Despite the wide acknowledgment of this burden, and a generalized pressure to drastically crackdown this, none of the current strategies result cost-effective to allow a large-scale uptake determining massive social and environmental impacts. Objective of RIVER CLEANING is exactly to introduce a cost-effective, flexible and easily maintainable solution for the capturing of plastics based on a series of rotating floating buys which allow the capture of floating waste. This system can capture up to 20kg / day of riverine plastics in standard operative conditions while being suitable for small rivers, urban rivers and even to protect critical industrial assets such as hydroelectric reservoirs. Moreover, this solution has a very low CAPEX and OPEX being suitable for public bodies, privates and NGO. This will allow to compensate for the current gap between plastic reduction policies and waste remediation approaches. Mold S.r.l., owner of RIVER CLEANING technology, expect to deploy up to 744 plants by 2030 thus capturing up to 5.3 million tonnes of plastics while generating €18.3 million of annual revenue turnover.

The project is built around the three main pillars of monitoring plastic litter, its collection and valorisation and, of course, the prevention of the distribution of non-degradable plastics. We will do so by strongly building on former projects addressing these topics and by connecting to previously identified major initiatives active in this area. For us, the most promising aspect is the activation and necessary participation of citizens affected by plastic pollution directly on the shorelines. We will guide them to becoming plastic entrepreneurs with a deeply rooted knowledge base and the right tools to start their own businesses through the valorisation of collected plastic litter and the provision of zero-waste solutions to all actors. We plan to employ 4 breakthrough innovations per pillar (monitoring, collection, prevention) that are neatly interwoven, building upon each other to create an even better whole. We will test these solutions in 8 demonstration sites in 8 Mediterranean countries and after validation, scale them up in 33 more sites with the potential to be launched across the whole Mediterranean. In parallel we will run two open calls to third parties to attract more solutions for implementation following our same methodology. All-in-all, we plan to map out 170 km2 for plastic litter, reach circa 100,000 citizens, collect around 400 tons of plastic waste, and build up plastic prevention pathways through scaling and replication for an equivalent of 3,700 tons of plastic.