Enaleia paid Greek fishers for plastic they already caught

Mediterranean fishing nets caught plastic constantly, tangled in with the fish — a decades-old can, bottles, flip-flops, fishing gear from other boats. The reflex on every crew was the same: keep the fish, throw the rest back. When Lefteris Arapakis, whose family had fished those waters for five generations, pulled a 30-year-old Coca-Cola can from his father's nets and a crewmate grabbed it out of his hands to toss it overboard, the man's explanation was simple: 'that's not what we're paid to catch.' Fishing crews were paid strictly for fish landed, so every boat threw back exactly the polluti

The standard conservation response to marine plastic was to fund dedicated cleanup — separate boats, separate crews, separate budgets — competing for donor money against every other environmental cause, and covering a tiny fraction of the sea that thousands of working fishing boats already crossed daily. Arapakis founded the nonprofit Enaleia in 2016 and, starting in 2018, tried something else: pay the existing fishing fleet directly for the plastic it was already catching but never keeping.

paid crews per ton of plastic landed

Crews already hauled plastic up daily, so no new trips or equipment were needed.

A separate payment for plastic made keeping it more valuable than throwing it back.

The incentive scaled with the size of the existing fleet, not with new cleanup boats.

Recycling revenue and donor funds kept the payments sustainable.

Pay for the byproduct your existing operation already handles for free, and you unlock collection capacity without building new infrastructure.

Within a few years the program had signed up more than half of Greece's large-scale fishing fleet — hundreds of vessels — and was pulling in close to 200 tons of plastic a year by 2022, over 7,500 pounds a week, while expanding into Italy and, more recently, Kenya. Arapakis was named a UN Environment Programme Young Champion of the Earth for Europe in 2020.