The “A Minha Praia” project has already collected around half a ton of garbage, involving around 280 students.
After five months of existence, the project “A Minha Praia” mobilized several students from all over the Algarve to collect marine litter at the six beaches mentioned in the region.
During the first season, which ran from 15th September to 15th October, there were seven campaigns on the beaches of Monte Gordo (Vila Real de Santo António), Barril (Tavira), Island of Faro, Pescadores (Albufeira), Meia Praia (Lagos) and Mareta (Vila do Bispo), which involved around 280 participants from the 1st to the 11th grade, from eight schools from the municipalities of Albufeira, Faro, Lagos, Loulé, Tavira, Vila do Bispo and Vila Real de Santo António.
«About half a ton of garbage was collected, consisting of 4761 items of various materials, sizes and origins», explains the Centro Ciência Viva (CCV) in Tavira.
According to this CCV, '91 different categories of marine litter were present, of which 35 are plastic and the rest are classified as rubber, paraffins, paper, wood, textile, metal, glass, ceramics and medical and sanitary articles ».
The project “A Minha Praia” was one of the winners of the 2017 Participatory Budget Portugal (OPP) and is coordinated by the Centro Ciência Viva de Tavira, which has partnered with the Centro Ciência Viva do Algarve and the Centro Ciência Viva de Lagos to create a network monitoring of marine litter along the Algarve coast.
Each Ciência Viva Center is responsible for carrying out several actions to monitor marine litter on the referenced beaches that are within its geographical reach.
These monitoring actions follow the methodology proposed and standardized by the OSPAR Convention (Convention for the Protection of the Marine Environment of the Northeast Atlantic), which is the current legislative instrument that regulates international cooperation in environmental protection in the Northeast Atlantic and of which Portugal is signatory since 1992.
This project also counts on the partnership of several environmental, scientific, institutional and tourist entities, of regional and national scope, namely the environmental associations Straw Patrol and A Rocha, the Center for Marine Sciences (CCMar) of the University of Algarve, the Portuguese Environment Agency – Administration of the Hydrographic Region of the Algarve (APA/ARH-Algarve), and the Portuguese Institute of the Sea and Atmosphere (IPMA), several Algarve municipalities and the Pedras d'El-Rei development.
By participating in these marine litter monitoring and collection campaigns, Algarve students from several academic years are sensitized to the problem of marine litter and its growing environmental, economic and social consequences.
The campaigns also lead them to practice the concept of “citizen science”, as with the records obtained on the quantities, types and seasonality of the garbage found, they contribute to national and international analyzes and studies on the permanence of garbage on their coasts. Portuguese and European
The monitoring and collection of marine litter on these beaches continues until July 2019, the project's completion date, with campaigns spread over three seasons (Winter, Spring and Summer), which are resumed during the second week of January.
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