A Moroccan initiative targeting plastic pollution in traditional markets has been selected by BeMed, the Beyond Plastic Med foundation, as one of twelve projects supported under its tenth annual call for micro-initiatives. The call, open from October 2025 to early January 2026, attracted nearly 140 candidatures from across the Mediterranean basin — almost double the previous year — reflecting what BeMed’s coordinator Claire Richard described as a growing and concrete mobilization of local actors committed to addressing plastic pollution.
The selected Moroccan project, Zero Waste Skhirat, focuses on reducing single-use plastic packaging at a pilot traditional market in the Rabat-Salé-Kénitra region. The initiative combines the introduction of reuse solutions — reusable containers, deposit mechanisms, and alternatives adapted to fresh produce, dry goods, and fish stalls — with positive incentive mechanisms designed to encourage lasting changes in behavior among merchants and consumers. Critically, the project is built on direct co-construction with the economic actors already present in the market ecosystem, including the informal sector operators who currently depend on disposable packaging as a core component of their trade.
Nadir Sinaceur, president of the Zero Waste Skhirat association, described, in a statement to Aujourd’hui le Maroc, the rationale for focusing on traditional markets: they concentrate heavy daily consumption of disposable packaging while serving as deeply embedded centers of local economic and social activity. Changing practices in these spaces, he argued, would generate impacts that ripple outward through community behavior far more effectively than targeting formal retail environments.
The pilot dimension of the project is central to its broader ambition. The team intends to use the Skhirat market as a laboratory for identifying the most effective and socially acceptable anti-plastic solutions — ones that can subsequently be adapted and progressively replicated in other Moroccan localities facing comparable waste management challenges. The approach explicitly acknowledges that solutions developed in one context may need adjustment before being transferred to communities with different social or economic profiles, the daily commented.
BeMed’s micro-initiative program provides seed funding and visibility to small-scale environmental projects along the Mediterranean coastline. The selection of a Moroccan project in the program’s tenth edition reflects both the growth of civil society engagement with waste reduction in Morocco and the international recognition that community-based, market-focused approaches can generate replicable models worthy of wider adoption.
