New CASSINI Prize to tackle marine plastic pollution with space data

26 million tons plastic wastes end up in oceans every year. Every single square mile of the world’s ocean surface polluted by plastic pieces has disastrous consequences for global environment, health and wildlife.

To tackle the global plastic pollution crisis, the Union has launched a new competition for Marine Ecosystems Protection, as part of the CASSINI initiative, aiming at developing space solutions to track and remove marine plastic pollution.

As previously announced by Commissioner Breton during his speech at the launch event of CASSINI Matchmaking at Vivatechnology in Paris, on 17 June:

“We will award three prizes of almost 1 million euro each, open to Europe’s leading SMEs, start-ups, innovators developing deep technologies and break through solutions for this very important subject for our environment.”

The awarded application(s) will use Copernicus and/or Galileo data in combination with other sources, to solve problems and to reply to customer needs related to the detection, monitoring and tracking of plastic pollution in rivers, lakes, shores and coastal zones. The state-of-the art solutions would also support plastic wastes removal in order to support the prevention of ocean pollution.

The prize will be awarded to one or several best data-driven marine or maritime digital application(s) meeting the criteria of the contest and is expected to leverage more private investment capital to the winning contestant.

Deadline to submit application is on 03 May 2023 17:00:00 Brussels time.

• Rules of the Contest are available here
• Prize on the F&T portal is published here