Marseille, a city in southern France, is famed among tourists for its ample sunlight and coastal attractions. Still, it was acknowledged that the well-known and loved beaches of Marseille were also subject to waste pollution, both industrial and domestic, the latter exacerbated by littering by visitors.

This is where MerTerre comes into the scene. Established in 2000, MerTerre is a non-profit organisation advocating marine waste reduction through investigating the quantities, qualities and origins of waste, with major projects such as:

1. Zéro Déchet Sauvage, a collaborative data platform to analyse information from waste collected during clean-up operations by various partnering associations, institutes and volunteers.
2. Adopt’1 Spot, a scheme where citizens take action in monitoring pollution and intervening on abandoned waste by cleaning up a designated spot several times a year.

Under a collaboration between MerTerre and make_sense, an international team for sustainability, collective efforts and community empowerment, the overarching goal of my LiA is to help MerTerre with marketing and data collection.

Specific tasks of my LiA:

1. Marketing
   1. Communication campaign to promote the mobile app of Zéro Déchet Sauvage, with visuals, website articles, toolkits for volunteers, and social media videos.
   2. Improvement suggestions regarding the MerTerre website user interface to incorporate the new Zéro Déchet Sauvage app.
   3. Public fund-raising strategy development.
2. Data collection
   1. Regular clean-ups to track waste data of a certain area.
   2. (Side quest depending on external funding) Development of a psycho-social survey regarding visitor littering behaviour.

Stay tuned to see how my LiA turns out!