As it celebrates its 50th World Environment Day, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) acknowledges that fishing plastic out of the sea is like grabbing a tiger by the tail.
“Trying to tackle the problem once it’s in the ocean is a big mistake. We need to stop it before,” Alejandro Laguna, UNEP’s director of communications for the Mediterranean, told Al Jazeera.
“No matter how many people we involve, we have areas in the ocean we just can’t reach, or the plastic might become so small, we might never be able to [retrieve] it,” he said.
Enaleia, the Greek non-profit organisation that retrieved the fishing net off Salamis, has made it its mission to grab the tiger by the tail.
That has meant solving an economic problem. Picking up rubbish is expensive. It requires human hands and transport.
The contribution of Enaleia’s founder Lefteris Arapakis has been to reach a cost per kilo few thought possible, and he did it by piggybacking on existing activities.
Arapakis did the math. There are an estimated 14,500 licensed fishing boats in Greece. If every one of them brought its plastic to port, they could gather tonnes a day. The problem was convincing fishermen to do it.
Arapakis has targeted the countries with the biggest packaging consumption and most developed industrial base to undertake the recycling – Greece, Spain and Italy.
Fishermen receive a nominal stipend of up to 50 euros ($53) a month, provided by blue chip donors such as Pfizer, Gant, Allianz and the shipowner, Costas Lemos’ Foundation, but conviction is what really drives them.
Having founded Enaleia to give himself and others gainful employment, Arapakis now seeks to make himself redundant, helping to realise UNEP’s goal of reducing marine waste by 80 percent in 2040.