D2.5 Integrated assessment of the cleaning operations effectiveness and their impacts

The present deliverable describes the environmental effects – positive and/or negative impacts – during the life span of the project of the remediation activitiesundertaken with the use of MAELSTROM technologies in the two demo sites considered by the project: Demo site 1: the Venice coastal area (IT) and Demo site 2: the Ave River estuary (PT). In Demo site 1 a robotic Seabed Cleaning Platform was applied to clean-up the litter deposited on the seafloor of an area located inside the Venice lagoon, and of another sea area located in the Adriatic Sea, in the Venice coastal area. In Demo site 2 the Bubble Barrier technology was applied to prevent the Ave River from transporting litter to the sea, in the coastal area of Vila Do Conde, Portugal. The deliverable illustrates the results of the integrated ecological assessment performed to evaluate the possible impacts of the remediation activities on the coastal ecosystems of both demo sites. The detailed results of the ecological assessments are presented in D2.3 and D2.4. The integrated assessment presented in this deliverable consists in the comparison of the values of different environmental and biological indicators, assessed before and after the implementation of the remediation technologies. The differences are assessed via statistical analysis. The description of the impacts of the remediation technologies is complemented with an overview of the results of ML removal in the demo sites. To do so, the reportsynthetically integrates the results of the effectiveness of the MAELSTROM technologies presented in deliverable D5.2 and D5.4, for the Seabed Cleaning Platform and the Bubble Barrier, respectively. Finally, the integrated assessment presented in this deliverable makes possible to achieve a comprehensive evaluation considering all the dimensions of sustainability of the technologies: environmental, economic and societal.