Do you know that in the Pacific Ocean there is an enormous floating mass of plastic garbage that extends for 1.6 million square kilometers?
On 3rd July, we celebrate the International Plastic Bag Free Day to bring awareness to the impact that plastic bags have on the environment. Reducing and eliminating its use can bring a great change for many communities around the world. Every year 5 trillion plastic bags are produced and only 1-3% of them are recycled. The ones that are dispersed in the nature take around 1000 years to degrade completely.
Around 100 billion plastic bags are consumed in the EU and make up 70% of the plastic waste found in the European waters, which at the same time constitute around 70% of the waste found in waters.
PLASTRECT, one of the seed money projects financed by Interreg South Baltic, aims at changing consumer behavior and the value chain by introducing waste sorting and recycling techniques to local supermarkets. The local supermarkets are re-designed as circular economy platforms, giving consumers and citizens the possibility to buy sustainable and secondary plastic-based goods and packaging and to recycle and reuse the plastic-based goods and packaging. The project is led by BOFA in cooperation with the Institute of Fluid-Flow Machinery Polish Academy of Sciences (Instytut Maszyn Przepływowych PAN).
