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.
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