‘Marine Landfills’: The Garbage Choking Greece’s Seas

Last year, on his annual visit to Corfu, Giorgos Kontarinis photographed sun loungers, a pedalo and various other objects on the seabed off Imerolia, a village on the north side of the island. A keen diver, he took another look this year. “I went swimming to the spot where I had found the rubbish last summer, wanting to see if anyone had taken the trouble to pick it up,” said 59-year-old Kontarinis, a photojournalist at the leading Greek press photo agency Eurokinissi. “I was shocked when I saw the same sight again.” Such a sight is becoming increasingly common in tourist resorts across Greece. “We’re talking about marine landfills,” said Giorgos Sarelakos, head of the volunteer environmental organisation Aegean Rebreath. Since 2017, Aegean Rebreath has organised seabed clean-up operations in over 60 areas across the country; it was also the initiator of the Blue Municipalities Network, the first network composed of local municipalities for the protection of the marine environment. Plastic makes up most of the waste, according to George Papatheodorou, Professor and Director of Oceanus-Lab at the Department of Geology, University of Patras, Peloponnese. Worse still, large parts of the Greek seabed remain “essentially unexplored”, he warned.