Thanks to the DEVLOK project, led by CIHEAM Montpellier, SEAQUAL INITIATIVE has begun a collaboration with Kerkennah’s local communities to clean and transform marine plastic into a valuable material: SEAQUAL® MARINE PLASTIC. The aim of the collaboration is to valorize marine plastic waste on the island and minimize the harmful effects of environmental pollution in the region.

The long-standing collaboration between SEAQUAL INITIATIVE and CIHEAM Montpellier goes one step further with the “Kerkennah Plastic Free” project, which was developed as part of the DEVLOK project, a local development project in the Kerkennah islands implemented by CIHEAM Montpellier and funded by the Delegation of the European Union in Tunisia.

The objective of the project is to create an institutional, economic and social environment suitable for structuring a plastic pollution management value chain which is local, profitable and sustainable, with the triple purpose of treating existing litter, increasing the amount of treated waste and reducing the amount of waste produced.
It involves the implementation of a citizen education and awareness program for the island’s population, and in particular its schoolchildren, as well as professionals, in order to increase the collective awareness of how important it is to take action against plastic pollution.

Since the project began in January 2021, the team has achieved their objectives despite all the constraints they have encountered related to regulations and health restrictions. In this time, 16 companies have been created or built up in the sector of plastic pollution management, 21 direct jobs have been created, 90 tons of plastic have been collected in 9 months by the main collector (compared to 10 tons in 2020), 300 kg of plastic are collected every two weeks by primary collectors (compared to 100 kg per month in 2020) and 25% of the plastic collected is now, for the first time ever in Kerkennah, crushed on site.

Encouraged by these results, CIHEAM Montpellier and SEAQUAL INITIATIVE have signed a collaboration agreement for the export and transformation of marine plastic from the Kerkennah Islands into new valuable and sustainable products, allowing better remuneration of all the actors in the Kerkennah value chain and guaranteeing a stable selling price throughout the year