The MARLESS Project

The MARLESS project intends to tackle the problem of Marine Litter in the Adriatic Sea from many fronts in order to obtain visible and concrete results. Numerous in fact are the factors that intervene in the creation of Marine Litter, plastics coming from the inlnads, plastics from the touristic sector or aquaculture.

The project's approach is therefore to address the problem using a holistic approach, intervening jointly on the scientific and monitoring aspects, without neglecting the involvement of citizens who generate waste but who can be very helpful allies in identifying them or in containing its expansion. Taking advantage also of the partnership's composition, which sees numerous regional and national public bodies, the project does not neglect even the normative aspect within which the proposed actions move and therefore provides a series of interventions for comparison between the partners in order to identify the bottlenecks created by the application of different regulations they have a community originator but which are then declined in national laws, which can facilitate the solution of the problem but can also unintentionally hinder it by coming into conflict with each other.

EMRG is involved in the task on “Pyrolysis testing on Plastic Marine Litter”, which includes the reception in Marina di Ravenna of about 250 kg of plastic samples collected by the Partners, the analysis and separation of the different kinds of plastic (polyamides, polycarbonate, polyester, etc.), the shipment to the Fraunhofer UMSICHT Sulzbach-Rosenberg Branch for pyrolysis with the dedicated iCycle® equipment, the shipment back of the products (oil, char and syngas) to Ravenna and characterization of the products in terms of elemental analysis, carbon content, heating value and pollutants content (sulphur, halogens). The expected output will be a procedure for the treatment of Plastic Marine Litters, adapted to the different kinds of collected plastic.