#arapakis

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.

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.

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.