The memory of Kostas Koutsafikis is a protest manifesto of the Aegean Sea. At 64 years old and from the porch of his house he remembers the sea of ??his childhood. “It was like swimming over a garden full of flowers.” Lost on the map, halfway between Athens and Thessaloniki, her home is a balcony on the Mediterranean surrounded by olive trees and connected by a single narrow and winding road to Achillio, the nearest town. A paradise with an expiration date. “Now there are more plastics than fish on the beach, I have to go down every two days to clean the sand – laments Kostas – and if it rains, it’s even worse.” And the sky hasn’t helped lately. This week’s torrential rains have turned the rivers, slopes and streets of the province of Thessaly into highways of waste towards the sea: the water drags down the river all the plastics abandoned in the open.
To the east of the Mediterranean, in the Lebanese city of Sido, poor waste management exacerbates the problem even more. Mohamad Elbaba’s black moccasins make their way through the plastic carpet that covers the beach. In front of it stands a giant landfill surrounded by a wall of rocks and cement, just five meters from the sea. Elbaba, councilor for more than a decade for ecology and waste management in Lebanon’s third largest city, with more than 160,000 inhabitants, watches anxiously as the mountains of waste threaten to rush into the sea. “We haven’t managed the waste here for more than three years: the problem is getting bigger and bigger”, he explains.
Greece and Lebanon are two examples of a global problem. As a whole, the Mediterranean receives almost 230,000 tons per year, according to estimates by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, a figure that is equivalent to throwing 17,000 plastic bottles into the water every minute. Billions of plastic particles that end up in the stomachs of marine fauna and threaten their survival. The high population density on the coast and around the rivers that flow into it make the Mare Nostrum the area most affected by plastic pollution in the world. If no action is taken, there will be more plastic than fish in the oceans by 2050, according to estimates by the World Wide Fund for Nature.
Elbaba bluntly points out part of the problem. “There is no money, nobody cares”, he says. In Lebanon, the financial crisis of 2019 froze the government budget for waste management and the Government stopped investing a single Lebanese pound to manage the city’s waste. Since then, the inoperability of the landfills located on the first line of the coast causes the garbage to end up in the sea. The streets of Sido are a reflection of the lack of control: garbage is piled up at the feet of full containers, on any curb or corner, in public parks or empty land. And, eventually, to the sea.
On the outskirts of Beirut, Mohammed Aleil’s networks certify the catastrophe. “Often, when we go out to sea, we find plastic instead of fish in the nets”, he complains. Aleil is 57 years old and has spent more time in the sea than out. After more than 40 years dedicated to fishing, the words get tangled in his throat when he explains that “he had never seen so much plastic as now: it is impossible to escape it, it is everywhere”.
There are other plastics that Aleil’s eyes cannot see. No one can: tiny particles, invisible to the human eye, which in the Mediterranean reach record concentrations of 1.25 million fragments per square kilometer. Almost four times more than in the “plastic island” of the North Pacific Ocean.
“Any plastic, with time, the sun and water, degrades and ends up becoming microplastic or nanoplastic”, explains Joaquim Tintoré, oceanographer and director of Socib, the Coastal Observation and Prediction System of the Balearic Islands . The micro are all those particles with a size of less than 5 mm, and the nano are even smaller. They are less than 100 nanometers, one millionth of a millimeter. They are also a pest. The Mediterranean contains only 1% of the planet’s water, but it contains 7% of all microplastics.
The lack of residual management in the countries of the Mediterranean basin explains almost 70% of the plastic that is thrown into the sea both from beaches and from rivers that flow into the Mediterranean, such as the Ebro, the Rhone and the Nile. The course of the great African river alone is responsible for 25% of all plastics that filter into the Mare Nostrum.
Waste management has always been Lebanon’s Achilles heel. In 2017, some airlines were already on the verge of canceling flights to Beirut because of the threat posed by the hundreds of seagulls that gathered at the airport, attracted by an open dump. Although it ended up being dismantled in time, the 2019 financial crisis once again threw the waste treatment system into disarray.
In Greece, tourist pressure means that many individuals like Kostas, who has turned his house into a guest house, take it upon themselves to clean up their piece of sea, since plastics accumulate on the coast without anyone noticing be in charge of managing them. According to Anastasia Haritou, member of the environmental organization Isea, “the maintenance of ecosystems and not tourism should be the top priority”.
The tenacity of Kostas is the same that pushes Mohamed Elbaba every day in Lebanon. When he took office in 2010, another large volcano of garbage presided over Sidó’s main beach. In front of the millenary old town and next to the sea, there was an open landfill. It took Elbaba’s team more than five years and a fund from the Nations to turn all that pile of waste into a garden, the park. A smile of satisfaction escapes Elbaba when he steps on the grass of the park, but his gaze darkens when he reaches a raised bridge with views beyond the enclosed field. In the distance, the new mountain of garbage can be seen in front of the sea. History repeats itself. With his hands clinging to the railing, Elbaba fixed his gaze on the horizon, convinced: “We’ll fix it again”.
