Greek NGO leads ‘crazy’ bid to rid Mediterranean of plastic waste

Salami, Greece – Three diver heads bobbed in the sea. Then two white balloons surfaced. Attached to them, recovered from a depth of 16 fathoms (29 metres, 96 feet), was the brown tangle of a discarded plastic fishing net.

The underwater cleanup, barely 1.5 km (1 mi) off the coast of Salamis Island and 40 km (24 mi) from Athens, was a small contribution to growing efforts to rid the Mediterranean of plastic waste.

On the occasion of the 50th World Environment Day, the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) recognizes that fishing plastic from the sea is like grabbing a tiger by the tail.

“Trying to deal with the problem once it’s in the ocean is a big mistake. We need to stop it sooner,” Alejandro Laguna, UNEP’s director of communications for the Mediterranean, told Al Jazeera.

“No matter how many people we involve, there are areas in the ocean that we just can’t reach, or the plastic gets so small we may never be able to reach it again.” [retrieve] it,” he said.

Mountains of salvaged plastic soda bottles are waiting to be recycled at Skyplast, west of Athens [Jason Psaropoulos/Al Jazeera]

UNEP’s latest measurements have found an average of 64 pieces of microplastic — fragments smaller than 5 mm (0.2 inches) in every square meter (10 square feet) of the Mediterranean Sea.

Plastic takes years to decompose and break down at sea. Such an amount on the surface suggests a staggering level of pollution below.

UNEP convenes a global treaty conference to reduce and recycle plastic pollution. If the agreement is reached, it will enter into force gradually from next year.

But the European Union has been taking measures to reduce and recycle plastic since the turn of the century and has outsmarted them.

Half of the plastic ever produced has been manufactured this century, research (PDF) shows, leading to ever higher pollution rates.

Enaleia, the Greek non-profit organization that recovered Salamis’ fishing net, has made it its mission to grab the tiger by the tail.

That meant solving an economic problem. Collecting waste is expensive. It requires human hands and transportation.

Enaleia’s founder, Lefteris Arapakis, helped achieve a cost per kilo that few believed possible, and he did so by piggybacking on existing operations.

The Revolution of Enaleia

“I’m probably the worst fisherman in Greece,” said 29-year-old Arapakis, a fifth-generation fisherman who scandalized his family by studying economics and business.

“We used to go fishing and my family boat filled up with plastic. The crew would throw it back into the sea. I said what are you doing?”

Arapakis did the math. There are an estimated 14,500 licensed fishing boats in Greece. If they all brought their plastic to the port, they could collect tons in a day. The problem was convincing the fishermen to do it.

Fisherman Nikolaos Mantis aboard his boat, the Vangelio
Fisherman Nikolaos Mantis aboard his boat, the Vangelio [Jason Psaropoulos/Al Jazeera]

“At first they think we’re crazy,” Arapakis said. “But we try to find the activist fishermen and the decision makers in every port. When you reach them, something magical happens. They begin to recruit the rest of the fishermen themselves. So we went from two [boats] up to 3,000 throughout the Mediterranean.”

That includes 1,200 in Greece – nearly a 10th of the fleet.

Arapakis has focused on the countries with the largest packaging consumption and the most developed industrial base to carry out the recycling: Greece, Spain and Italy.

His team has just recruited the first activist fishermen in Egypt and Kenya.

Nominal stipend

Fishermen receive a nominal stipend of up to 50 euros ($53) per month, provided by blue chip donors such as Pfizer, Gant, Allianz and the shipowner, Costas Lemos’ Foundation, but belief is what really drives them.

“Nets have cork along the top edge and lead weights along the bottom edge, and are meant to stand vertically in the water,” fisherman Nikolaos Mentis told Al Jazeera.

“Plastic bags float in nets and by catching the current they tip sideways so you can’t catch any fish.”

Plastic also causes expensive mechanical problems.

“If I ever see a plastic bag floating around that could get caught in the propeller, I try to pick it up,” said Mentis. “If I’m not affected, someone else will be. It is not only plastic shopping bags, but also large, thick nylon tarpaulins that are used by the fish farms.”

The turning point came with the COVID-19 pandemic.

“In the first five days of the pandemic lockdown, we lost 40 percent of our donors,” said Arapakis, who was taken aback.

A friend advised him to delegate more tasks to the local population in the 42 Greek ports where Enaleia operates waste containers.

“By involving locals behind the scenes, we showed that we were legit, and that increased the number of participating fishermen. Suddenly our plastic collection took off,” says Arapakis. “We went from 15 tons [in 2019] up to 50 [in 2020]and up to 150 [in 2021].”

His latest plan is to piggyback on vacationers.

“We work a lot on remote beaches in the Cyclades [a group of Greek islands]who have no access from land, where a lot of plastic washes up,” Arapakis said.

Paying cleaners would be expensive, but he found sponsors for vacationer tickets.

“They clean up and do their summer swims,” ​​he said.

Enaleia’s model of synergy-based cleanup is still small – it only manages to collect 250 tons of plastic per year.

To put this in perspective, Greece consumes 270,000 tons of plastic a year, recycles 85,000 tons of it and buries 141,000 tons in landfills, according to the Institute of Economic and Industrial Research (IOBE).

About 43,000 tons are simply missing from the equation, most of which are presumably scattered in the environment.

But Enaleia has grown 17 times in five years, more than tripling every year. At that rate of growth, it could recover 114,000 tons of plastic per year in another five years.

Inspirational plastic

Enaleia, whose name means “in the sea,” has also captured the public imagination by focusing on marine plastics. The largest category of recovered plastic is discarded fishing nets, which are processed into synthetic fiber clothing.

Enaleia recently partnered with Skyplast, a plastic recycling plant west of Athens, where it sends its cargo for processing.

Skyplast is a market leader, responsible for 17 percent of Greece’s plastic recycling, but it’s gone beyond the grunt work of sorting, shredding and hot-washing soda bottles.

Skyplast has recruited blockchain codewriters to create a tracking process from cleanup to recycled retail products and markets its plastic chips as Recovered Seaside Plastic.

It has shared this technology with other recyclers through a certification vehicle called KeepSeaBlue.

Lefteris Arapakis standing in front of Enaleia's plastic catch of the day, in the Skyplast marshalling yard
Lefteris Arapakis standing in front of Enaleia’s plastic catch of the day, in the Skyplast marshalling yard [Jason Psaropoulos/Al Jazeera]

The initiative works. British supermarket chain TESCO proudly advertised that it used Recovered Seaside Plastic from Greece to package its fresh fish.

“Retailers have no choice but to make their products more environmentally friendly,” KeepSeaBlue spokesperson Maria Karka told Al Jazeera.

“There is a lot of demand for this from the market and consumers. So big players are shifting to more responsible practices.

Moral advantage could help the recycling industry compete with cheaper virgin plastic.

“What I see with certain brand owners is they’re all in favor of sustainability and using recycled content and stuff, but it’s all a matter of price as well,” says Skyplast sales director Hana Pertot.

The Extinct Tote Bag

State initiatives lack the marketing know-how of Enaleia and KeepSeaBlue, but they have an economy of scale.

Greece introduced a 3 cent surcharge for plastic bags at supermarket checkouts in 2018, following an EU directive, and raised the price to 7 cents the following year.

The Institute for Retail Research (IELKA) found that plastic bag use in supermarket chains had fallen by 99.9 percent by 2021, surpassing the EU target of reducing consumption to 40 bags per person per year.

Per capita consumption in Greece fell from 167 to 0.1 and created an industry for biodegradable bags.

There are also examples of spectacular public failures.

After 2001, the EU introduced a system of blue bins for plastic, paper, metal and glass waste.

In 2018, Greece still sent 80 percent of its household waste to landfill, reports the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development found itbecause municipalities did not implement the program properly.

But Arapakis insists the blue bin program is not a failure because layered programs and approaches complement each other.

Trawlers in Keratsini, west of Athens, taking part in Enaleia's marine plastic clean-ups
Trawlers in Keratsini, west of Athens, take part in Enaleia’s marine plastic cleanup efforts [Jason Psaropoulos/Al Jazeera]

The municipality of Salamis is an example of this. It benefits from Enaleia’s cleanups, implements the blue bin program, shreds and composts its prunings and introduced two new programs last December that financially reward consumers.

Vans are sent home to buy sorted recyclables with coupons.

Paper shredders located outside supermarkets issue tokens that can be redeemed at the checkout for 3 cents per package item.

“Since Christmas, 700,000 packages have been recycled – plastic, aluminum, glass,” Antonis Vakalis, the waste manager of the municipality of Salamis told Al Jazeera.

“We even have people collecting discarded packaging on the street to put it through the shredder and claim the loot,” he said.

“Before Christmas, these items would have ended up in the environment, some in blue bins and most in landfill.”

Having founded Enaleia to provide paid employment for himself and others, Arapakis is now seeking to make himself redundant, helping meet the UNEP goal of reducing marine litter by 80 percent by 2040.

“We will have helped solve one of the greatest social problems of our time,” he said. “Don’t you think the knowledge we’ve gained will help us solve other problems?”