Last week, more than 100,000 Norwegians went to the shores for cleaning litter off our beaches in a huge voluntary campaign. Norner organised the largest campaign in our local community with 90 employees, friends and customers. We managed to clean a coastline of 3 km for about 0,5 ton (!) of litter. 

Sustainable focus

• Sustainability is high on the agenda in Norner. Sustainability underscores everything that we do – both the products that we develop and design, and the way we run our operations.
• We work to ensure that we meet all our own environmental responsibilities and to help our customers achieve theirs. Norner’s commitment to sustainability is evident throughout our products’ lifecycles.

Marine Litter

• Plastics represents the most significant marine litter challenge and we are convinced that our unique plastic experience, and competence will play a significant role in research and development to find good solutions to this challenge.
• The coastline of Norway is among the world longest when considering the fjords and due to the major currents like the Gulf Stream and others, massive amounts of marine litter lands on our shores. This is in addition to a wide range of domestic sources of litter.
• Plastic marine litter has gained a lot of attention. The magnitude of marine litter is overwhelming and seems as a huge challenge to solve. Once litter has reached the oceans it is very difficult to clean up. Therefore, it is a very important achievement when UN last autumn managed to negotiate the first international commitment to stop litter to reach the sea. We look forward to seeing further results of this initiative.
• Typically, the litter which travels with the currents floats in the sea and this is the nature of those main plastics which are used in both single use and durable products. Most of what is found in the sea is therefore ropes and nets from shipping and fishing industry, packaging, bottles and single use items or foam and other building products. 
• The Norwegian media has covered the problem of marine and plastic litter in depth during the past few years and this have, together with a high attention from the authorities, created the high awareness in our population. Norwegians are nature loving and it gives a practical meaning of doing something useful when we participate to help solving one of the fastest growing environmental issues we have internationally and it's a huge task to reverse with 8 million tons of plastic ending up in the sea every year.

Our Beach Clean Day

• On May, 3rd, we gathered at the beach of the beautiful Eidangerfjord in Telemark. We spread our troops over a beachfront of 3-4km equipped with sacks and gloves and a scuba diving team went subsurface to remove marine debris. During the next couple of hours approximately 150 bags and a total of almost 0,5 ton was brought back to our point of litter collection. You can see for yourself on the pictures the amounts collected. 
• When all this litter collecting was done, we enjoyed the late sunny evening with a barbecue on the beach and nice time together. In this way we combined a social event with employees and customers with this very useful campaign. 
• The litter collected can be categorised as follows: rigid packaging (50 kg), various rigid plastics (70 kg), plastic films and bags (60 kg), expanded foams (10 kg), rope and twines (75 kg), glass/bottles (40 kg), metal boxes (20 kg), various metal scrap (60 kg), paper/wood (40 kg) and clothes/shoes (15 kg) which all together is 440 kg. 
• In the fractions of rigid plastics, we found most of those typical small and larger items like nurdles/pellets, Q-tip sticks, scrubber pall rings, syringes, caps, pails to large cannister, a chair and plastic pipe. 

Norner believe that we all can be a part of the solution to stop marine littering. Norner will actively work with the industry to develop and implement solutions, and continue to increase awareness and competence to impact consumer behaviour.