Enaleia

I am applying for The Elevate Prize, to build awareness of the global problem of plastic in our oceans and to replicate the model of the Mediterranean Cleanup around the world. My goal is to reduce drastically the amount of marine plastic that pollutes our water and threatens fishing communities everywhere.  My team and I at Enaleia are working with low-income fishing communities in Greece and Italy to make the Mediterranean Sea plastic-free. Together, we created a wide-scale marine plastic cleanup, the Mediterranean Cleanup, which is the 5th biggest in Europe and introduced recycling and upcycling activities to use the collected waste. If I am selected as a winner, I will use the Elevate Prize funding and support to achieve two milestones. First, to replicate our work and organize cleanups in other areas of the world that face the challenge of marine plastic pollution and have large, low-income fishing communities. We are already setting up pilot operations in Kenya, India and the US. Your prize will accelerate the process. Secondly, I will utilize the Elevate Prize to expand revenue streams of product sales, subscriptions, plastic offsetting, and upcycling to sustain and scale our operations on a global level.

My name is Lefteris Arapakis and I am the co-founder and director of Enaleia, a non-profit enterprise, which in Greek means “together with the fishermen”. My family has been fishermen for 5 generations, but I was the first one that decided not to follow family tradition and study economics instead. When the financial crisis peaked in 2016, I decided with a friend to co-found Enaleia, as the first fishing school in the country, to fight unemployment. We had won a competition of the Angelopoulos CGIU program and received seed funding and mentoring. Creating the curriculum, we went on fishing trips around the Cyclades. There I was shocked to find out that fishermen caught huge amounts of plastic in their nets along with the fish. Worst of all, they would pick out the fish and discard plastic back to the sea. So, I decided to find a way to incent fisherman to bring this waste to the port. Then, I sought partners to recycle/upcycle this marine plastic into the circular economy. My vision is to clean the seas, protecting marine ecosystems and empowering fishing communities. For this work, I was awarded from the UNEP as Young Champion of the Earth 2020.

The problems that we are solving are marine plastic pollution and overfishing, two problems that threaten the livelihoods of fishers around the world.  The fishing catch in the Mediterranean has fallen by 34% over the last 50 years. At the same time, the amount of plastic in the sea has grown exponentially with the fisheries industries themselves accounting for 20% of the plastic entering the Mediterranean each year. It is estimated that by 2050 there will be more plastic than fish in the sea. 

Enaleia has built a network that includes all the relevant stakeholders to tackle the marine pollution problem, from local fishing communities to recycling/upcycling partners. Specifically, in every port we operate, we train fishermen about sustainable fishing techniques and motivate them to bring to the port the plastic they fish. In sequence, at each port, we have a person who collects and records the amounts of marine plastic that each fishing boat brings. They sort it depending on the litter's type and store it in special containers placed at each operational location. Afterward, the biggest portion of the collected marine plastic is promoted for recycling/upcycling into new products.

What makes our work different compared to other cleanups is that we utilize an existing economic activity with an existing established network to clean the sea. We have tapped fishermen, who are already running their boats and trawling their nets, to capture and transport the waste. This means that we do not introduce negative externalities or increase the carbon footprint to do the cleanup. Another element that makes our work unique is the education that we provide to fishermen since it requires a profound change in their mentality. I was able to gain their trust because I come from their communities. Even though I did not choose to follow the same path, I know exactly their language, their attitudes, and how to motivate them. I used my familiarity with their reality to communicate my vision for cleaner seas. I helped them see that it was their future that they were rescuing. Thus, our solution's innovation is not placed in any technological hub or any experimental lab, but it is based on creating trust with local fishing communities.  In this way, we create a massive and efficient plastic clean-up operation, making it scalable through working with fishing communities around the globe.

We have collected more than 150.000 Kg of plastic from the bottom of the sea so far, protecting the marine ecosystem and human health, increasing the income of low-wage fishermen and providing education to fishing communities for issues of climate change and ocean recovery. Perhaps our project's most important impact is that we have brought the fishing industry that had not any involvement in the climate action nexus to be part of it, joining our common vision for cleaner seas. The most inspiring success indicator is when fishermen,  tell us that in areas where they used to find vast amounts of plastic bycatches, now they barely can find any plastic.  This is a story that a fisherman can tell another fisherman around the world. We mitigate the effects of plastic pollution on the marine environment since each plastic collected from the sea is equivalent to fewer dead fishes, fewer trapped sea mammals, and fewer microplastics in our food chain. Back in port, there are many smiles from people who made their part for a better world. From our work, low-wage fishers generate extra revenues, creating one of the most cost-efficient and effective marine cleanup activities in Europe. Why not everywhere?