Last week, the news came thatCleanup Norway in Time programmehave cleaned up plastic waste along as much as 50% of Norway’s outer coastline. Since 2024, the plastic waste has not only been removed, it has also been analysed through a comprehensive monitoring programme.
“The item we find by far the most of is short cut-offs from rope, known as net mending offcuts. These offcuts end up in the sea in connection with repairs to nets and trawls,” says Marte Haave, Senior Researcher at SALT, who has been responsible for the monitoring programme.
The researcher believes that this could quite easily have been avoided through better procedures on board the vessels and changes in attitudes in the industry.
Both the monitoring programme and coastal clean-up through Cleanup Norway in Time are fully funded by the plastic bag fee paid to The Norwegian Retailers' Environment Fund.
Møre og Romsdal tops the litter statistics
The 2024 figures show that Møre og Romsdal is the county with the most litter in Norway, with more than 250 kilograms of waste per kilometre of coastline.
Mona Hegglund is CEO ofPlastjegerne ASwhich is one of the cleanup operators in Møre og Romsdal. Despite the large amounts of litter washing ashore, they do not lose heart.
“We now clean up an average of 1.2 tonnes a day. There is clearly less now than the first time we cleaned up, but the influx is still enormous. We love what we do, and believe that what we do is important and meaningful,” says Hegglund.
Trøndelag, Troms and Finnmark follow close behind Møre og Romsdal. In Svalbard, the density is even higher – more than 500 kilos per kilometre – but here, too, the clean-up efforts are concentrated in the most exposed areas. This picture may change over time as even more data and knowledge become available through Cleanup Norway in Time.
Funding to stop littering
“The bag fees ensure that we both get the litter cleaned up and gain valuable knowledge about what and who is polluting our coastline. The knowledge leaves no doubt about where we need to focus our efforts – but there is no point in cleaning up without turning off the tap,” says Cecilie Lind, CEO of The Norwegian Retailers' Environment Fund.
This is why The Norwegian Retailers' Environment Fund will soon launch a new call for applications, where funding can be sought for measures that stop littering. The knowledge from the monitoring programme shows both what is being littered and who is littering, so we want to support measures that directly address these findings.
• Cleanup Norway in Time's monitoring programme monitors 85 sites several times a year across the country, carried out by cleanup operators in the Cleanup Norway in Time programme. Of these, litter from 30 sites is analysed in detail across 260 different item categories.
• The Norwegian Retailers' Environment Fund owns and finances the monitoring programme
• The programme was developed by SALT Lofoten, which also analyses the litter and the data
• The programme aims to provide a solid knowledge base for prioritising future clean-up efforts, preventing marine litter in Norway and evaluating the effect of measures implemented
• Fisheries, aquaculture and the maritime sector are the largest contributor to marine litter in Norway, measured by weight.
• Small plastic pieces of unknown origin dominate in number all along the coast, including soft plastic, hard plastic and expanded polystyrene (EPS).
• Of the items that can be identified, offcuts from net mending are the ones most often found along the coast.
• Of the items that can provide information about country of origin, almost 60 per cent originate from Norway and our neighbouring countries.
• Møre og Romsdal, Trøndelag and Troms og Finnmark are the counties with the highest density of marine litter, measured in kilograms per kilometre of cleaned coastline.
