The fish market of Keratsini, west of Athens, is abuzz in the early morning, with trawlers disgorging crates of sardines and anchovies as trucks await nearby to be loaded.
However, on his family’s fishing boat, Lefteris Arapakis sorts out a different sort of haul: bottles, boots, plastic pipes and fishing nets, all dragged from the bed of the Aegean Sea.
“We are swimming in plastic,” said Arapakis, whose family has fished for five generations.
Photo: AFP
By 2050 “there will be more plastic than fish” in the sea, he said, quoting recent reports.
That morning’s plastic catch “weighs about 100kg,” said Arapakis, a 29-year-old economist and cofounder of Enaleia, an nongovernmental organization that encourages fishers to collect marine litter caught in their nets.
Since its creation in 2018, it has worked with more than 1,200 fishers in Greece to raise awareness over the degradation of the maritime environment.
The seabed litter does not only come from Greece, but from all over the Mediterranean Sea, moving with the sea currents.
Active in 42 ports throughout Greece, Enaleia provides fishers with large bags for marine waste that they can deposit in dumpsters once back at port.
For every kilogram of plastic they deliver, they receive a small “symbolic” sum. The money is enough for a drink, said Arapakis, who was in Paris this week for global talks on limiting plastic pollution.
Representatives of 175 nations are meeting at the UNESCO headquarters to reach an agreement by next year covering the entire plastics life cycle.
Since October last year, fishing crews affiliated with Enaleia have dragged out 20 tonnes of plastic and fishing equipment each month. Nearly 600 tonnes have been collected over the past five years, the organization said.
The collected plastic is transported to a recycling plant in the industrial area of Megara, near Keratsini, to be turned into pellets to make new products such as socks, swimwear or furniture.
One-sixth is fishing nets, Enaleia said. Next in line are high and low-density plastics — 12.5 percent and 8 percent respectively.
However, nearly half of the total, 44 percent, is non-recyclable plastic, it said.
Recycling marine waste is a “challenge” because the plastic is degraded by its exposure underwater, recycling plant Skyplast sales manager Hana Pertot said.
Enaleia began as a fishing school created by Arapakis after he lost his job during the 2016 Greek financial crisis.
It was originally created to help his father recruit personnel for his trawler, he said.
The organization is active in Italy, and this year began partnerships in Spain, Egypt and Kenya.
Arapakis said he embarked on the Mediterranean Cleanup project after a trip to Greece’s Cyclades islands, where he saw fishers throwing the waste gathered by their nets back into the sea.
In 2020, the UN Environment Programme awarded Arapakis its Young Champion of the Year in Europe prize.
He said he thinks that there has been a “mentality change” among Greece’s fishers.
Previously, “we caught large quantities of plastic, but we only kept the fish. All waste was thrown into the sea,” said Mokhtar Mokharam, the team leader on Arapakis’ family’s boat.
There are practical benefits for fishing boats.
“In the past, the anchor often snagged on waste of all kinds, especially nets, and the engine would go out,” said Nikolaos Mentis, who works out of the island of Salamina, opposite Keratsini, and has been an Enaleia contributor for the past five years.
“Fishers are mobilizing, [it is] a kind of democracy. Climate change mainly affects people on low incomes,” he said.
“Fishers were part of the problem before. Now they are part of the solution — which means that any citizen or politician can contribute,” he added.
Airlines in Australia, Hong Kong, India, Malaysia and Singapore yesterday canceled flights to and from the Indonesian island of Bali, after a nearby volcano catapulted an ash tower into the sky. Australia’s Jetstar, Qantas and Virgin Australia all grounded flights after Mount Lewotobi Laki-Laki on Flores island spewed a 9km tower a day earlier. Malaysia Airlines, AirAsia, India’s IndiGo and Singapore’s Scoot also listed flights as canceled. “Volcanic ash poses a significant threat to safe operations of the aircraft in the vicinity of volcanic clouds,” AirAsia said as it announced several cancelations. Multiple eruptions from the 1,703m twin-peaked volcano in
Farmer Liu Bingyong used to make a tidy profit selling milk but is now leaking cash — hit by a dairy sector crisis that embodies several of China’s economic woes. Milk is not a traditional mainstay of Chinese diets, but the Chinese government has long pushed people to drink more, citing its health benefits. The country has expanded its dairy production capacity and imported vast numbers of cattle in recent years as Beijing pursues food self-sufficiency. However, chronically low consumption has left the market sloshing with unwanted milk — driving down prices and pushing farmers to the brink — while
‘SIGNS OF ESCALATION’: Russian forces have been aiming to capture Ukraine’s eastern Donbas province and have been capturing new villages as they move toward Pokrovsk Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi on Saturday said that Ukraine faced increasing difficulties in its fight against Moscow’s invasion as Russian forces advance and North Korean troops prepare to join the Kremlin’s campaign. Syrskyi, relating comments he made to a top US general, said outnumbered Ukrainian forces faced Russian attacks in key sectors of the more than two-and-a-half-year-old war with Russia. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in a nightly address said that Ukraine’s military command was focused on defending around the town of Kurakhove — a target of Russia’s advances along with Pokrovsk, a logistical hub to the north. He decried strikes
China has built a land-based prototype nuclear reactor for a large surface warship, in the clearest sign yet Beijing is advancing toward producing the nation’s first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, according to a new analysis of satellite imagery and Chinese government documents provided to The Associated Press. There have long been rumors that China is planning to build a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, but the research by the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in California is the first to confirm it is working on a nuclear-powered propulsion system for a carrier-sized surface warship. Why is China’s pursuit of nuclear-powered carriers significant? China’s navy is already
RSS