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Greek activist fisherman receives honorary title from UN

The founder of Greece’s first school for professional fishermen and an activist for cleaner seas and healthy fish stocks, Lefteris Arapakis, has been bestowed the honorary title of ambassador for the Mediterranean coast for 2021-22 by the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP).

Awarded in the context of UNEP’s Mediterranean Action Plan, the title is “a recognition of the team’s work and shows us that we are on the right path, doing something that is having an impact,” says Arapakis, founder of Enaleia, a startup that trains and incentivizes the local fishing community to collect plastic from the sea.

“It is a recognition of all the professional fishermen and all our associates in the battle against marine pollution from plastic,” adds the fifth-generation Piraeus fisherman who was also named Europe’s Young Champion of the Earth by UNEP in 2020, at the age of 26.

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Fishing for plastic

Clean seas activist Lefteris Arapakis from Greece has been named a Young Champion of the Earth for 2020 by the United Nations Environment Programme.

Lefteris Arapakis comes from a long line of fishers. For five generations his family has plied the bountiful waters off southern Greece, netting the same cod and red mulls that have sustained Greeks for millennia.

But in recent years, overfishing and pollution, especially discarded plastic, have hammered Greece's fisheries, with catches in the Mediterranean Sea falling as much as 34 per cent in the last 50 years.

Out at sea, Arapakis, 26, noticed many boats around his hometown of Piraeus hauling in nets filled with rubbish, instead of fish. This plastic by-catch was then simply dumped back into the water.

“I got more and more worried about the scarcity of fish and the increase of plastic,” says Arapakis, who trained as an economist. “I was deeply concerned that my father, and now my brothers, could not make a living out of this job, which is what they learned to do and what they love to do.”

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Greek fishermen paid to collect rubbish caught from the sea for recycling

To help clean the seas around Greece, fishermen are being paid €200 a month to recycle waste from their nets. More and more plastics and cans are being pulled from the waters as well as the fish. A new Greek company called Enaleia has backing from Greek and foreign donors to introduce a more sustainable way of fishing.

In the last year, Lefteris Arapakis, founder of Enaleia and his team have started an ambitious programme with Greek fishermen. They have given financial incentives so when the fishermen find waste in their nets they don’t throw them back into the sea but keep them to be recycled later. Arapakis and the Enaleia organisation were crowned Young Champions of the Earth by the United Nations Environment department in June.

Arapakis said, “We removed a Coca-Cola can with a very weird colour. So I got it and saw that it had expired in 1987. This thing was in the sea for 30 years. This was the first thing that shocked me. The second thing was to see the fisherman throw it back into the sea. He told me that he was not paid to catch waste, but fish"

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Fishing for plastic in Greece - LEFTERIS ARAPAKIS - Young Champion of the Earth 2020 for Europe Lefteris Arapakis (Greece) founded the start-up Enaleia, through which the team trains, empowers and incentivises the local fishing community to collect plastic from the sea, allowing both fish stocks and the ecosystem to recover. Enaleia is also prototyping recycling the plastic into fashion merchandise like socks and swimsuits. “Discarded single-use plastics are notoriously ubiquitous and have adverse and far-reaching environmental and socio-economic impacts, including on human health,” said Gaetano Leone, an expert in plastic pollution with the UNEP. “The inspiring work that Lefteris Arapakis is doing with Enaleia demonstrates that individual and local initiatives driven by passion and shared priorities are crucial in complementing action taken at the regional level.” Video by UN Environment Programme