Grantee: The GRAB Trust

Duration:  9 months (July 2025 – March 2026) 

Update: The CivTech challenge is now live, and accepting applications from innovators with ideas to tackle the challenge.

Background

Marine litter is an extensive environmental problem on the West Coast of Scotland – with significant impacts on wildlife and local residents. In Arrochar, a village in the Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park, the pollution is particularly bad. A combination of topography, currents, and winds results in large volumes of plastic waste being deposited, generating what the Scottish Government have officially designated a ‘litter sink’.

The Project

The GRAB Trust has been tackling marine litter in Argyll and Bute since 1999, and has previously been supported by HIEF.

A variety of solutions to the Arrochar litter sink have been trialled in the past, for example using diggers to lift the plastic-entangled seaweed to landfill. These have been neither cost effective or sustainable, and the GRAB Trust is now exploring innovative solutions through participation in the CivTech programme.

CivTech is a government backed programme designed to develop new solutions to real world problems. By bringing together public, private, and third sector organisations, CivTech invites innovators to prototype their ideas and develop a working solution.

In the context of Arrochar, this solution could be a technology capable of separating plastic from seaweed or preventing the waste from accumulating in the first place. There is potential for technology to be developed that would help to address this problem elsewhere in Scotland and further afield.

This HIEF grant will support the GRAB Trust’s costs to participate in the ‘Exploration’ phase of the programme.