Removing plastic from our waterways before it reaches our oceans
| This daily dash is taking place at Newcastle Racecourse 12 July |
With more than 2,000 miles of waterways in England and Wales flowing through a mosaic of rural and urban landscapes with a multitude of different land and recreational uses, our canals and rivers are under and ever present threat from plastic.
Today, innovative plastic collecting technologies exist and are being deployed in our oceans. However, these solutions, such as hard structures, can be impractical and/or impossible to implement on smaller waterways or may introduce other environmental challenges.
To address this challenge, this creative dash will explore how the Canal & River Trust can address the plastic problem once it has entered its waterways, with the intention of reducing the amount of plastic that ends up in our seas and oceans.
Through an exploration of the challenge and co-creative activities, we will explore potential technologies, operational methods and partnerships to reduce plastics in waterways.
We will then rapidly develop solutions and build prototypes to take out the plastic on the surface, underwater and on the waterbed out of our waterways and manage it using circular economy principles.