Medoro participates as a partner in the implementation of the ARPPAD (Actionable Responses to Plastic Pollution and Aquatic Degradation) project. The project was presented under the call HORIZON-MISS-2025-03-OCEAN-02. It builds on, but goes further, the EU's ongoing initiatives tackling marine litter, such as the EMFAF plastic pilot projects, CleanAtlantic and Plastic Pirates. These projects have advanced methods of monitoring, awareness, and regional cooperation, but remain largely fragmented across geographies or focused on awareness (Plastic Pirates), monitoring (CleanAtlantic), or localized pilot projects (EMFAF). ARPPAD differentiates itself by integrating these strands into a single operational Toolbox for municipalities that combines prevention, monitoring, removal and policy alignment. Unlike previous projects, ARPPAD provides a replicable, cost-based governance and funding model (CAPEX/OPEX models, permitting protocols, cascading funding mechanisms) that allows municipalities to move from project-based experimentation to long-term system-wide adoption. By aligning with Mission Ocean KPIs and ensuring interoperability with EMODnet, DTO, and MSFD TGML STANDARDS, ARPPAD consolidates dispersed results and funnels them directly into EU governance frameworks. This ensures that the knowledge generated by previous projects is scaled, operationalized and integrated into municipal decision-making in a way that no existing initiative has yet achieved. The Toolbox will be structured as modular components – monitoring protocols, dashboard visualization, citizen engagement tools and policy templates – that municipalities can adopt individually or in combination. Each module will be interoperable with EU data infrastructures, allowing adaptation to different governance contexts and fiscal capacities. At the heart of ARPPAD are the Municipal Toolbox for Tackling Plastics and Litte, a modular, user-oriented package that brings together monitoring, prevention, and removal measures along the land-river-sea continuum.
The toolbox is not designed as a theoretical construct, but as a practical decision-support resource for municipalities, enabling them to assess, prioritise and act on local challenges in line with EU policy standards and objectives. ⮞ The monitoring module provides common standardised protocols, data models and decision thresholds for the assessment of waste in environmental compartments: beaches, rivers, surface waters, water column and seabed. In line with MSFD TG ML guidelines, these protocols ensure comparability between basins and interoperability with EMODnet and Digital Twin Ocean. The results of the monitoring flow directly into the Toolbox dashboard, where municipalities can visualize hot spots, flows, and trends, enabling evidence-based prioritization of interventions. ⮞ The prevention module provides municipalities with models, engagement strategies and partnership models to reduce plastic at the source. This includes community outreach (schools, NGOs, citizen science), circular economy pilot projects with local industries (e.g. packaging reduction, recycling programmes) and targeted actions with the fisheries sector (gear marking, recovery and recycling).
The project partnership is as follows:
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