Greetings from lead partner

We are being fed daily with pictures in the media showing animals suffering the consequences of littering, plastic in the marine environment.That’s why we at Keep Sweden Tidy are happy to be a part of the project BLASTIC.

In this project we want to help municipalities around the Baltic Sea to take action and mitigate marine litter and live up to commitments they have taken and the framework that is currently in place and even take a lead and show examples on how to tackle marine litter. Most of the marine litter comes from land based sources, so the best way is to stop it at its source. This is what the project BLASTIC will contribute to.

The Project Partners just recently met in Tallinn, for discussing and planning our work in the nearest future. So far our major outputs are that SEI Tallinn centre has developed a checklist for mapping the sources, flows and pathways of plastic litter, this is almost finalized and they will also perform the mapping in pilot areas based on the developed checklist. Our pilot areas are the municipality of Ventspils, Turku, Tallinn and Södertälje.  During next year the monitoring will start and IVL is developing a methodology for monitoring plastic litter and will carry out the monitoring of plastic litter in the pilot areas based on the developed methodology.

A great news for us is that BLASTIC has become a Flagship project under Policy Area Hazards in the EU Strategy for the Baltic Sea Region (EUSBSR), we are very proud of this and here is the logo to show it.

EUSBSR flagship label cmyk_web200x200

We will put our outputs from the project for example finalized reports on our web page and do not hesitate to contact us for more information.

Representatives from our Project Partners are also out and about, so check out news and coming events on this website so we can meet in person.

 

All the best,

Elin Leander and Eva Blidberg

Keep Sweden Tidy

Elin Leander is working as a project leader at the Keep Sweden Tidy with focus on marine litter. Elin has a M.Sc. in Marine Biology with a specialty in eco toxicology from Stockholm University, additionally she has studied Environmental Law and Science communication. She has a broad experience both in marine biology and policy making. Most recently Elin comes from a job in Brussels as a policy strategist and advisor at the European Parliament, working for a Swedish member of the Parliament.

Eva Blidberg is a marine biologist with a doctor degree in marine ecotoxicology. She has worked with different marine and/or chemical matters the last 15 years, and has since 2012 focused on marine litter at Keep Sweden Tidy. As project leader at Keep Sweden Tidy, Eva works with everything from beach litter picking campaigns to acquisition of knowledge in projects as BLASTIC and beach litter monitoring on behalf of the Swedish Agency for Marine and Water Management. She is also a member of HELCOM expert network on marine litter. Eva has a strong relation to the sea and a great interest of making the world a little better.