In Ithaca, a dark and unfortunate catastrophe was causing environmental havok on the local marine life, environment, marine traffic and local communities. An aquaculture fish farm was abandoned some 10 years ago. As the abandoned fish farm’s physical structures continued to deteriorate, the impact on the local marine habitat could no longer be ignored. (Read to the end to see the incredible before and after shots…)

Ithaca is a welcoming and picturesque Greek Island paradise in the Ionian Sea, a short 35 minute ferry trip from Sami, on the North East coast of Kefalonia. Also known as Homer’s Ithaca, as described in the Odyssey of Homer – Ithaca was the land of the hero Odysseus.

The Island is pretty small at only 96 square kilometers and a population of around 3,500. While Ithaca is relatively tiny, it’s famous for its lush, green environment and crystal-clear turquoise waters. The coastline is dotted with secluded blue-green bays, many of which narrow to white pebbled beaches that are surrounded by blankets of green indigenous vegetation.

Small fishing villages, discreetly tucked away in these secluded coves, each with their own little marina or dock, welcome small power boats and the local fishermen who bring the daily catch. These little villages are quaint, easy to access and almost always have tavernas offering the fresh fish and locally sourced fare.

The island is popular amongst sailors, cruisers and pleasure-boaters who enjoy anchoring in the tiny sheltered lagoon-like bays, spending their days relaxing on the water or visiting the island. It’s easy to understand why – I could easily imagine myself spending some days on a sailboat anchored in one of these isolated bays.

It goes without saying that tourists love the island for it’s natural beauty – every summer, thousands of travelers visit the island to take advantage of the sun, the beaches, the warm hospitality, and all the fun ocean activities they could hope for.

The Abandoned Fish Farm

In 2012 an entire fish farming operation was abandoned in Ithaca. The commercial entity allegedly went bankrupt and as a result, all operations ceased and assets were seized by the bank.

Unfortunately the site was not decommissioned when the fish farm was abandoned. There was a lot of speculation and debate about who was at fault and who should take responsibility. As a direct result, in the interim, the fish cages, plastic structures and walkways, nets, buoys and moorings remained at sea, continuing to heavily populate the local marine environment and nearby beaches.

For those that don’t know, a fish farm is a type of commercial aquaculture where fish are raised in cages, or enclosures, that float at sea. Today, about half of all the fish consumed globally are raised in artificial environments. In general a fish farm will keep the local environment clean and free from any pollutants that could potentially harm their fish.

Over the last 10 years, efforts were made by other organisations, trying to bring awareness to the catastrophe unfolding in Ithaca but sadly, until now, no actions were ever taken.

As the years passed, bad weather and other external factors caused the integrity of the fish farm to deteriorate. Some of the plastic frames (cages) and most of the steel structural frames and substructures had already broken and sunk to the ocean floor.

There were roughly 20 to 22 fish cages, the frames of which are constructed with thick plastic (PE/PP) pipes that are pumped full of polystyrene (PS) for buoyancy. These cages are round with a diameter of between 20 to 30 meters and can weigh several tonnes.

In September of 2020, the tropical cyclone “Ianos” wreaked further havoc on the already dilapidated fish farm, causing many of these plastic frames to break. While the nets sink to the bottom, the polystyrene filling escapes, floating on the surface and drifting onto the nearby beaches.

Polystyrene is slow to biodegrade and as a result has become a rather controversial topic amongst policy makers and environmentalists. It has become increasingly abundant as an environmental contaminant and can be found littered on just about every beach around the world.

The sunken cages not only devastated the local beaches by spewing their polystyrene innards, they also blanketed the ocean floor with their aquaculture nets.

These aquaculture nets lying on the ocean floor have had a massive impact on the local seagrass meadows which are an integral part of the marine ecosystem and incredibly important for sustaining life in the ocean, and on land. This Posidonia Oceanica or Mediterranean Tape Weed has an extremely high carbon absorption capacity, capable of soaking up more than 15 times more carbon dioxide than a similar size piece of the Amazon rainforest.

Since the farm was abandoned, many of the fish cages and aquaculture nets have sunk to the ocean floor. These nets are referred to as ghost gear or ghost nets – they continue to catch and trap fish even after they have been discarded or abandoned. It goes without saying that these ghost nets are one of the most detrimental contaminants in our oceans and have a severe impact on marine life.

Thanks to a few images of the abandoned fish farm posted online by George Lilas, a passionate local diver and founder of Odyssey Outdoor Activities in Ithaca, the teams from Healthy Sea and the Ghost Divers quickly jumped into action. The Netherland-based marine conservation organisations joined forces with Enaleia, a local marine conservation initiative led by Lefteris Arapakis.

Together these organisations embarked on the biggest environmental cleanup project that they had ever taken on – either collectively or individually.

Healthy Seas

Healthy Seas was founded in 2013 to tackle the ghost fishing phenomenon that is responsible for the needless death of marine animals. Through cleanups with volunteer divers and by working with stakeholders of the fishing sector toward marine litter prevention, they collect waste nets and ensure they become a valuable resource.

Healthy Seas have cleverly helped develop other brands that use the waste nets, turning them into other products for their “From Waste to Wear” projects.

Nylon fishing nets are regenerated together with other nylon waste by Aquafil into ECONYL®, a regenerated yarn used to produce new products such as socks, swimwear, activewear or carpets. Healthy Seas socks is one such product.

Since 2013, over 90 sustainable businesses have partnered with Healthy Seas, by taking action and helping to fund sea cleanups, prevention and education activities.

Healthy Sea Socks are born from Ocean waste in this way. Health Seas and Ghost Diving collaborate to recover lost and abandoned fishing nets. These nylon nets are then turned into a yarn that is blended with organic cotton. The final product is an innovation that demonstrates a true commitment towards marine conservation and protecting the natural environment.

Ghost Diving

Ghost Diving is a registered charity organisation of volunteer technical divers specialised in the removal of lost (ghost) fishing gear and other marine debris since 2009. They are the largest international diving organisation working on the “ghost fishing” topic with a track record in a significant variation of countries and international waters. Their main goal is to expose the problem of abandoned, lost or otherwise discarded fishing gear worldwide. They do this by removing this fishing gear and visualising it to the public.

After more than a decade carrying out technical diving projects, their group of volunteer divers managed to bring the “ghost fishing” phenomenon into the public spotlight, through key international collaborations, inspiring underwater photography and unparalleled results. To this day, the Ghost Diving team has carried out diving projects independently or in collaboration with several international environmental and/or diving organisations like: Healthy Seas Foundation, Greenpeace, WWF, Global Ghost Gear Initiative and Global Underwater Explorers.

Enaleia

Enaleia is a non-profit social enterprise tackling two directly related problems for the marine environment; The Reduction of Fish Stocks and Plastic Sea Pollution.

They teach fishing practices that preserve local fish populations and remove the mounds of plastic that pollute the world’s seas, adapting the fishing industry for a green future. Their mission is to make the marine ecosystem sustainable by tackling both overfishing and plastic pollution.

Enaleia’s superpower is their Mediterranean Clean Up initiative where they train and incentivise fishermen to bring the plastics they “fish” back to port, collecting tons of plastic from the sea every day. They also collect the fishermans’ used equipment to prevent them from ending up in the sea.

In collaborations with other entities, Enaleia ensures the collected Ocean plastics are returned to the circular economy. This means that the Oceans plastics are not dumped in a landfill or simply discarded with other trash – Enaleia makes sure that all this plastic gets recycled into pellets that can then be used to make other plastic products. Hence, integrated back into the circular economy for recycling and upcycling.

Lefteris Arapakis, founder of Enaleia was named as the “Young Champion of the Earth” in 2020 by the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP).

The Fish Farm Mission

It was evident that the abandoned fish farm was an environmental catastrophe, one that posed a stain on the otherwise pristine island. The derelict infrastructure of the farm lay to waste, above and below the surface, imposing a monumental impact on the natural environment.

The mission was clear: Clean it all up, above and below the surface.

The volunteer technical divers with Ghost Diving are the heroes that were tasked with removing the ghost nets from our oceans. They sometimes spend hours below the surface, using inflatable lift bags to bring the heavy nets to the surface where the crane can then lift them on to a ship. Heavier items like the metal walkways, railing and pipes are lifted by a crane platform.

We can only hope that once the nets and other debris have been lifted from the ocean bed, that this seagrass will begin to grow again – but this could take decades to regenerate to its original size.

I was volunteering as part of the beach cleanup crew from the first day on the 9th of June, until the 11th. In the short three days that I was able to take part, I feel like we achieved so much and had such a positive impact.

On the first and second day, the divers pulled some of the floating cages closer to the beach, cut them into 4 meter sections with chainsaws and loaded them on to a large ship. This ship would then take all the plastic back to mainland Greece for recycling. On the first day they managed to load 4.5 tonnes of plastic onto the ship! That’s massive!!

Four of the nearby beaches were literally covered in microplastics, nylon ropes, plastic buoys, bottles and more polystyrene than I had seen in my life. So, while the divers were lifting nets and cutting up the fish cages on the main beach, the surface crew were cleaning the other beaches that had fallen collateral to the disaster.

On one of the beaches there were two abandoned boats, one steel barge and a plastic rib-type boat. Both boats were completely tangled with nylon ropes and nets that had either drifted from the farm or were simply left behind.

Everything we collected on this beach, including many steel tubes pulled up from the ocean floor, tires and nylon ropes, were all put into the plastic boat, ready for the crane to collect.

On the third day, the cleanup crew could finally access the main beach and started cleaning the polystyrene and other microplastics that covered the beach.

Once the large chunks were collected, we had to be quite creative to find efficient ways to pick up the smaller polystyrene pellets and microplastics. To start with there was so much, we could use shovels or simply scoop the polystyrene off the pebbled beach by holding open the large bin bags. In just a short few hours we had filled 37 bags with polystyrene.

After all the styrofoam chunks and other plastic had been collected and bagged, the team used an industrial vacuum cleaner to get the rest, leaving no pebble unturned and no plastic in sight.

For 8 days, 14 volunteer technical divers from Ghost Diving worked tirelessly to get rid of the fish cages, pipes and nets while the surface volunteers cleaned up the beaches. Overall, the team removed 5 tonnes of fishing nets, 32 tonnes of metal, 39 tonnes of plastic, including 150 bags of polystyrene foam pellets.

76 tonnes of marine debris! That’s equivalent to 76 small cars, 15 elephants or 20 orcas.

Hyundai Motors Europe provided funding for the project that wouldn’t have been possible was it not for the support of many other partners such as  Kefalonia Fisheries, the Hellenic Coast Guard, Odyssey Outdoor Activities, Aquatic Scuba Diving Club, Scubalife, the Municipality of Ithaca and Prefecture of Ionian Islands, Kosamare and the Ionian Environment Foundation and the Decentralized Administration of Peloponnisos, Western Greece and Ionian that gave the permission for the cleanup. The project was held under the Auspices of the Hellenic Ministry of Maritime Affairs.

Check out the hashtag #journeytoithaca on Instagram and Facebook for all the content generated during and after the project.

Before & After

Eco-Minded Tips

If you’ve read this far in this post, chances are high that you’re already an eco-minded ocean lover. For the rest, read these two articles from the blog.

1. How to Master Environmentally Responsible Travel: Become a Mindful Eco-Traveler
2. How to Ace Eco-Friendly Travel Packing

As a rule of thumb, simply choose to avoid all single-use plastics. Here’s a list of everyday single-use plastics that can be avoided in our daily lives.

• Cotton bud sticks
• Cutlery, plates, straws and stirrers
• Balloons and sticks for balloons
• Food containers
• Cups for beverages
• Beverage containers
• Cigarette butts
• Plastic bags
• Packets and wrappers
• Wet wipes and sanitary items

Always travel with a refillable water bottle, reusable travel mug and a stainless-steel or bamboo straw.

Remember: every time you refill your water bottle, or ask the barista at your local cafe to use your travel mug, you’re saving the environment from one more plastic bottle, coffee cup or straw.. Every little bit counts!!

If you’ve enjoyed this post, please subscribe with your email – I will send you an email every time I publish a new post.

**All pictures are credit to the original photographers. George Lilas, Veronika Mikos, Michael Westreicher, Mark Stap, Imad Farhat.