Outside #7 Vent Debout is a project carried by 3 young ocean lovers who are specialized in biodiversity and natural heritage. This young crew launched their own campaign The Mechanics of Plastic to reduce plastic waste during summer 2019. Onboard in their sailboat, they planned several stopovers to meet citizens making them aware of the plastic mechanics in a beautiful and innovative way.
What does your project consist of ?
The Mechanics of Plastic is a campaign to reduce plastic waste on the Breton coast, not to be missed this summer. From July to August 2019, we will sail along the Breton coasts and stopover in 8 volunteer municipalities. In each of these municipalities, 3 watchwords: collection, recycling, and awareness-raising.
In each of the municipalities, beach clean-ups will be organised with the citizens and volunteers. The collected plastic waste will then be recycled directly on site using two small machines: a shredder to shred the plastic into small chips and an injector to melt the plastic chips and inject them into a mold. Our stops in the municipalities will also be accompanied by various activities on the impact of plastic on biodiversity, how to reduce waste and how to consume less plastic on a daily basis.
Why this project?
The Mechanics of Plastic project subject is part of the major ecological issue that concerns both public policies and civil society today: plastic. Far from claiming to be able to solve the problem, we are convinced that concrete and easily implemented projects like this one contributes to societal change.
Our project is firstly and foremost designed to raise awareness of the impacts of plastic on the marine ecosystem and on ourselves. To have a greater impact and to create a memory of the project, these youngers made an innovative creation: “precious plastic” machines. The “precious plastic” project is a Dutch initiative that aims to boost plastic recycling worldwide. These machines are within everyone’s reach, for local control, making it easy to reuse plastic.
Your message to be conveyed
However, our objective is not to promote recycling. The recyclability of plastic is widely used to justify its production, and this is not our message. The current figures for industrial recycling are very low, in France, only 22% of used plastics are recycled and machines will allow us to highlight this reality on a smaller scale, since not all plastics collected on beaches can be recycled.
In partnership with the Surfrider Foundation Europe association, awareness-raising materials can be given to the youngest among us, so that they have all the keys to a sustainable future. Nothing will have been left to chance in this project, right down to the means of transport. The sailboat allows to keep an environmental coherence, it is the most neutral means of transport in terms of CO2 emissions.
It will also allow us to analyse the concentration of microplastics off the coast of Brittany and thus to draw up a complete inventory of plastic pollution in Brittany. At your request, we can compile this data into a report that will be delivered to you before the end of the year and will, therefore, report on the current plastic pollution but also on the various actions taken on your territory to combat this pollution.
