Research by the Italian Institute for Marine Research (CNR-ISMAR) found the canals of the historic city center of Venice to be littered with a large amount of waste and in particular, car tyres; this is due to the common practice, especially by heavy load transport boats, of using tyres as boat fenders.
Project Objectives:
- Tackling tyre pollution in the Venice Canals;
- Collect and manage abandoned waste;
- Awareness raising to encourage the use of alternative solutions to the use of tyres and eventually modify the regulation for the coordination of local navigation in the Venetian lagoon to explicitly ban the use of tyres as fenders.
The interventions started in 2019 and are ongoing; the city of Venice has authorised the clean-up activities through three Local Authority Council Resolutions released in 2019, 2021 and 2022 (DGC 233/2022). To date, 25 canal cleaning sessions have been undertaken, 23,500 kg of waste has been collected (including 1,100 tyres).
