It is a great honour for us to announce that the FabLab association is part of the international consortium of the RIPPLE project, led by the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Zagreb and accepted under Horizon HORIZON-MISS-2025-03-OCEAN-02. Together with like-minded organisations from Spain and Greece, we prepared the project application four months ago. We thank the  Regional Development Agency of Dubrovnik-Neretva County and the University of Dubrovnik for supporting the idea that the pilot activity in Croatia should centre on the river Neretva, and for joining the project. Since the Neretva only flows through Croatia towards the very end of its course, an activity in Bosnia and Herzegovina has also been designed within the project, where external project partners will join in. 

Over 48 months, 16 partners from Greece, Spain and Croatia, together with associated partners from Bosnia and Herzegovina, will develop the following themes.

Plastic pollution in rivers is one of the fastest-growing threats to marine ecosystems, with most of the plastic in the oceans originating upstream. RIPPLE addresses this challenge at the source, preventing plastic from entering rivers and, ultimately, the sea.

By combining design thinking, maker innovation, citizen science and open participatory tools, RIPPLE offers an innovative, community-led approach that goes beyond mere clean-ups. The project raises awareness, educates and empowers citizens and local stakeholders to change behavioural patterns, while at the same time turning the plastic collected into valuable resources through affordable and readily available fabrication technologies.

RIPPLEbuilds a multi-layered framework in which prevention, education and reuse create small but powerful changes – ripples – that spread into systemic impact. Through affordable design interventions, participatory monitoring and the creative reuse of plastic, the project mobilises local communities, schools and citizens as co-creators of solutions.

This integrated approach ensures that less plastic reaches rivers in the first place, while the plastic that does reach them is turned into opportunities for learning, creativity and innovation.

As the initiators of the Mediterranean Makers Initiative, we are all the prouder of this project because it embodies every value that initiative stands for.