The opening conference day felt less like a conclusion and more like a preview of what lies ahead for the Baltic Sea Region. From the outset, speakers made it clear that circularity is no longer a distant ambition but an active practice. Cities like Turku – the event host aiming to achieve carbon neutrality by 2029 – demonstrated how circular solutions are already being tested in real-life environments, spanning construction, food systems and water cycles. Scientific insights into the interaction between microplastics, algae and marine organisms underlined the scale of the challenge, while contributions from high-school students offered a compelling reminder of how quickly awareness can turn into action when younger generations are empowered.
Development Director of the City of Turku Björn Grönholm introducing the city's goal of becoming climate neutral by 2029.
Across sessions and discussions, cities including Helsinki, Tallinn, Valmiera, Västerås and Daugavpils shared practical experiences of implementation, revealing what transformation looks like once strategies become everyday habits. Alongside sober assessments of environmental risks came moments of optimism – visions of a plastic-free 2045, evidence of policies evolving through cross-border cooperation, and proof that long-standing partnerships can accelerate change.
Joining with a regional policy perspective, Marta Ruiz from HELCOM Secretariat highlighted how project-based experimentation feeds into regional frameworks, including the Baltic Sea Action Plan and marine litter action plans. BALTIPLAST is a concrete example of how EU projects help test measures, close knowledge gaps, and support policy development.
By the end of the first day, one message resonated strongly: the solutions are no longer hypothetical. They are tested, shared and ready for uptake! And the place that brings them all together? The BALTIPLAST digital platform, which also features an educational kit for local authorities!
Cooperation accelerating the progress towards better future
A dedicated session highlighted how EU-funded projects reinforce each other’s impact by working as part of a wider ecosystem rather than isolated initiatives. Several projects – PlastLIFE, ChemClimCircle-2, REMEDIES, and CLEAN Beach – presented complementary approaches ranging from litter prevention and circularity to sustainable procurement, monitoring, and co-created prevention pathways. Together, they demonstrated how shared learning, aligned objectives, and coordinated experimentation accelerate progress towards a plastic-free Baltic Sea.
This message was further reinforced by Agnieszka Ilola from the Union of the Baltic Cities Sustainable Cities Commission, who highlighted the strategic role of transnational partnerships in unlocking innovation across the region. She underlined how cities, supported by networks and EU cooperation, can drive systemic change through tools such as green public procurement, peer learning, and long-term collaboration.
Agnieszka Ilola with an intervention on the importance of transnational cooperations.
The change is an emotional process
Shifting the focus from innovation to scale, BALTIPLAST examined how existing solutions can be mainstreamed and what barriers still stand in the way. A central panel on reducing single-use plastics highlighted that the challenge is less technical than human – behavioural change is an emotional process, not a purely rational one. Subsequent sessions explored tools for green governance through concrete examples of plastic-free events in Sweden, Latvia and Estonia, each showing the importance of flexibility, testing and continuous adaptation.
The conference concluded with a live demonstration of the BALTIPLAST platform, translating dialogue into a practical resource. And to reinforce the interventions, participants then split into groups to explore hands-on solutions to get further inspiration from the City of Turku, leading the circular economy and climate ambitions.
The main highlight of the site visits was a guided tour to the Topinoja Waste Management Centre, a major waste management facility in the Turku region, showcasing Finland’s approach to circular economy and recycling. The visit began with an environmental educator’s presentation on how waste (particularly plastic) is recycled in Finland. A striking fact shared was that Finland pays €90 million annually in EU penalties for non-recycled plastic, emphasizing the urgency of reducing plastic waste. The lecture sparked lively discussion among participants and highlighted how waste management centers also engage in environmental education for children and school groups, teaching proper sorting and recycling practices from an early age. Following the presentation, participants boarded a bus for a guided tour of the Topinoja sorting station, where they observed operations firsthand.
Topinoja Waste Management Centre through the bus window.
Another group went for a visit to the Ruissalo botanical garden, which operates as part of the University of Turku, offering a testbed for research and practice in increasing biodiversity and adapting to climate change, while also ensuring a high-quality water treatment performance, required by the plants under the garden's care. The botanical garden spearheads activities on raising citizen awareness of possible threats to the ecosystem: often man-made solutions can exacerbate the climate change risks, with tree-cutting leading to coastal erosion, or drying wetlands resulting in increasing forest fires. Environmental education in Finland starts early: the nature school is a core part of the education system, and pupils from grades 8-10 visit the garden several times a year to learn how to care for nature, properly recycle, and how to avoid producing plastic waste.
The university also runs a versatile laboratory on site, where different solutions are tested throughout the year, f.ex. microalgae research is currently ongoing for treating nutrient-rich wastewater, which later allows reusing nutrients and solids as fertilising materials, - the whole process neatly demonstrating circular economy in action.
Visiting the greenhouses.
Rather than offering easy answers, the BALTIPLAST final conference reinforced a clear conclusion: the lasting reduction of pollution, in this case plastic pollution, depends on structural change, emotional readiness and governance that makes the sustainable choice the default choice.
