Abandoned fish farms in Greece are plaguing the coastline with marine debris; however, Healthy Seas is working to clean up some of the sites and raise awareness for support to tell the Greek government that fish farm owners should be responsible for cleaning up their sites once the business is done operating.
In this episode of the "How to Protect the Ocean" podcast, host Andrew Lewin discusses the pressing issue of ghost farms—abandoned fish farms that are polluting oceans, particularly in Greece. The episode highlights the work of the organization Healthy Seas, which is actively involved in cleaning up these ghost farms.
Key Points:
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Definition of Ghost Farms: Ghost farms are abandoned fish farms that were once operational but have been left to deteriorate, leading to significant environmental pollution. Unlike ghost nets, which can be found randomly in the ocean, ghost farms are known sites with identifiable owners.
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Extent of the Problem: There are over 150 ghost farm sites identified in Greece, with one cleanup in 2024 removing over 40 tons of marine debris, including plastics and fishing nets. The cleanup costs range from 100,000 to 200,000 euros, depending on the site's location and accessibility.
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Healthy Seas' Approach: Healthy Seas, led by Veronica Mikos, began addressing this issue after encountering a local environmentalist while on a project in Greece. They have since cleaned up two ghost farms and are advocating for better policies and enforcement to prevent future abandonment.
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Challenges in Cleanup: The cleanups are labor-intensive and require specialized equipment. Many of the materials, such as polystyrene, degrade and pose risks to marine life, as fish may mistake them for food.
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Policy and Enforcement Issues: Although laws exist regarding environmental protection and aquaculture, enforcement is lacking. Veronica suggests that fish farming companies should be required to deposit funds to cover cleanup costs, ensuring accountability.
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Community Involvement and Awareness: Healthy Seas emphasizes the importance of raising awareness about ghost farms and involving local communities in discussions about aquaculture practices. They aim to educate future aquaculture professionals about the environmental responsibilities associated with fish farming.
The episode concludes with a call to action for better policies and community engagement to ensure that abandoned fish farms are cleaned up and that the aquaculture industry operates sustainably.
Healthy Seas Podcast: https://www.speakupforblue.com/show/speak-up-for-the-ocean-blue/show-199/
YouTube Video from Healthy Seas: https://youtu.be/yu56xH8MQxg?si=--VsZQIK7fk3yhlO
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As a critical source of food, jobs, and environmental solutions, aquaculture plays a vital role in feeding the world sustainably. But with great potential comes great responsibility. In today's episode, we'll address one of the major challenges that threatens its sustainability. We'll uncover the hidden issue of ghost farms, abandoned fish farms polluting our oceans, and organizations like Healthy Seas are working to clean up over 150 affected sites. Stay tuned as we discuss how policies and enforcement should improve to ensure that the aquaculture industry can thrive while protecting our planet and maximize its potential for future generations. Let's start the show. Hey everybody, welcome back to another exciting episode of How to Protect the Ocean Podcast. I'm your host, Andrew Lewin, and this is the podcast where you find out what's happening with the ocean, how you can speak up for the ocean, and what you can do to live for a better ocean by taking action. If you're new to this podcast, this is a podcast. Like I said, we find out everything about the ocean. If you want to find out more information, you can go to speakupforblue.com, our website. Check out all the podcast episodes, all the YouTube shows, everything that we have. We have other podcasts up there like Beyond Jaws and Aqua Docs and Fancy Scientists. We have a lot of episodes out there, a lot of content for you to find out more about the ocean, more about wildlife, and get yourself educated and made more aware of how you can protect the planet. You can also get our newsletter, direct to your inbox Monday to Fridays at 8 a.m. Just go to speakupforblue.com/newsletter to sign up. That's speakupforblue.com/newsletter to sign up. Now, let's talk about the episode. We're going to be talking about ghost farms about six months ago. I interviewed the executive director of Healthy Seas, Veronica Mikos, who was on the podcast to talk about a recent ghost farm that they helped clean up. They created a trailer for it. They created a YouTube video for it. It was something that inspired me to do another episode on it. I did a full interview and you can check out the audio podcast on our podcast back. I'll link to it in the show notes and in the description. I wanted to cut up the interview a little bit and just show some of the stuff that they've been doing. The organization was very nice and they lent me and allowed me to show some of the stuff you've already seen. Some of the footage that they took showing how they cleaned up and what they needed to clean up these sites. This is one of those episodes that I've been wanting to do for a long time. I wanted to bring you so I'm super excited to be doing this. The first thing you need to know is that this episode is going to be different than on my normal structure of the podcast. I'm going to be cutting in and out of an interview and some of the interviews that they took throughout the process of cleaning up a ghost farm near the island of Ithaca as well as some interviews they did and some other footage they've done in the past. At the time of the interview that I did, they had cleaned up two ghost farms. But they've done more since then. We'll be sharing updates in the future about their progress. But the key thing that you need to know is that ghost farms are a problem, especially in Greece. There have been 150 sites identified that need to be cleaned up. One of the sites that they cleaned up in 2024 had over 40 tons of plastic cleaned up. Marine debris, all sorts including fish nets, including pipes, including the plastics and polystyrene that are used to float the pipes so that they stay at the surface of the area. There was so much to clean up that these cleanups cost a ton of money. Each of these cleanups are different in terms of how much the cost is going to be. Some of the costs that they've had is basically ranging from 100 to 200,000 euros. Think about that 100 to 200,000 euros just to clean up site and they all differ because of where they're situated. There are some places where the fish farms are located down like a valley into the ocean, like into a bay, but they have to bring these big machines down inside of a hill. So you need to have the right equipment to do that. It's hard to access the actual site just from the people, the people power that it takes. Sometimes the nets are buried on the ground, like underneath the ground. There's just little pieces that they're trying to pull off just to get access to the nets that are there that could pose problems for years and years to come. Imagine that effect in an area over and over and over again 150 times. This is the problem that's identified and it's really interesting in how this all came about. But the first thing I want to do, I want to introduce you to Veronica Mikos. I'm Veronica from Healthy Seas, Director of the Foundation and already since 11 years, we've been focusing on plastic pollutions, most specifically ghost nets in the seas and oceans. Healthy seas started off as an organization that cleans up marine debris. There are so many different types of marine debris that you can clean up. And the way healthy seas is built, it's built based on divers. Volunteers that go in and actually clean up marine debris, whether it's been a scuba diver that goes down and is just doing a pleasure dive and just to clean up marine debris as they see it. In first hand, I've seen divers take out fishing nets, cut out fishing nets from reefs and certain things like that. This is more dedicated. They identify areas where there's lots of marine debris and they go for it. So that's how the organization was built. Now, how did they come across ghost farms? Because they didn't know about ghost farms. Not many people knew about ghost farms. How did they come about it? I'll let Veronica tell you. So, we've been in Greece in 2020 setting up a project in COVID times, which was not easy at all. No, I got that. And we cleaned up one of the biggest submarines of the Second World War from ghost nets. And that was in the Union Islands in Greece in Catalonia. And the neighboring island, Itaka, we just really came over for two days of holiday to recover from all the big projects. And then we met a local environmentalist, a dive center owner there, who was just literally telling us, "I've seen you guys what you were doing. It was in the news. Congratulations." If you want to clean up something really big, these were his words. If you want to clean up something really big, we got a fish farm here. I didn't quite understood what he means by a fish farm. I've never heard or seen anything like that before. And a fish farm, again, it was owned by somebody. It was a company operated it. And this was my understanding. And you can give me more detail. This project was essentially an abandoned... The company went out of business and decided to leave this fish farm at some point. But it continued to keep that infrastructure, so all the pieces, so the nets. This was an open pen fish farm, meaning that it was in the ocean. There were nets in the ocean, a series of nets in the ocean, that you could identify from the air. You know, from either a satellite imagery or from a plane of some sort. Can you give us sort of detail of what you found when you went to the site? Exactly. So, one of the big differences compared to a ghost net we find randomly anywhere. Or a ghost farm is that the ghost farms had once had an owner, so it's known. With the ghost net, we don't know. And the other difference is the scale of the pollution. We are not talking about one single piece of fishing net. But complete facilities being abandoned with scattered waste on the surface. Covering coastlines of hundreds of meters, sometimes kilometers. So what we have seen was really, really shocking. From the distance, the coastline and the rocks looked white. So we thought, "Okay, that's white, Babble." Till we went closer and we could see that that's the styrofoam, the polystyrene material degrading. Inside the pipes of the fish farm they use this material. If you want me to name number one evil material of the fish farm, then this white poison, which is covering the coastlines in the sea. It's tiny particles floating and the fish thinks that it's food. It looks exactly like fish food. So it's very harmful polluting both on land. So just imagine that you're an organization that just ponied up money and parted with people to clean up a World War II submarine. The debris around that area. And then you've done that for a week, maybe longer. You're going to take a couple of days vacation to relax from that intense time. This is hard work, folks. This is not easy work. Not only are you diving, you're not diving for pleasure. You're diving to take up marine debris. It's a little dangerous, but it's also tough work. You're taking a vacation for one or two days. Somebody comes upon you and says, "Hey, you know what? If you really want to love what you're doing, if you really want to help, you'll help clean up this coast farm. This fish farm that was abandoned because it ran out of money and nobody cleaned it up. It's just sitting there. It's sitting there in a bay where the equipment that's there to hold the pens to hold all the fish is gone. There's no fish and the pens just start to break down because there's nobody there to maintain the pens. So it's just broken down. It's all in the bay. We can't go swimming. It's gross. There's marine debris all over the place, like polystyrene, so basically styrofoam that's floating around and the fish are eating it. It's not good for tourism, which many of these Greek islands are based off of. It's just not good. It's not good for the local people. It's not good for the environment. So if you really want to do something, you can do it. And they took it upon themselves to say, "Hey, you know what? We are going to do it. I don't know how yet, but we're going to figure it out." Imagine that. Imagine just thinking that this is what we're going to tackle just coming across because you're a marine debris cleanup organization. Why not clean up a ghost farm? Right? How do you go about it? How do we even start? It's something that is unreal to me, but they did it. They start off in 2020. They go and they clean up this fish farm and they learn a lot as they go through it. So much so that they're able to do another one in May of 2024. And they've been able to accomplish that a little faster. They've teamed up with Hyundai who takes some of the filaments from the net and they make the car mats out of it. So they have a reason to reuse the nets so it's not just discarded into a landfill. They partner with it. They help fund the project and this is what comes out of it. The experience was really shocking. I would say amazing to see everything that can be done here, but also really sad to see the situation because it's something that I was not expecting. Even though we've already had this project but living it here, life and seeing all the waste that's everywhere, you only see the surface maybe around here. But everything that's underwater, it's completely full of nets, of pipes and there's so much waste around the beach. So yeah, my feeling is very positive that we're doing this for the environment, but also very sad to see what humans come through to our waters and to our world. And although this project is great, to be able to say, hey, we've cleaned up two ghost farms, right? These fish farms that have been abandoned by their owners, business ran dry, they had to give it up back to the government. Now it's a public entity. The government doesn't do anything with it. It just leaves it there and allows it to just basically fall apart. So you've been able to clean up two of these sites, but there's still 148 more of these ghost farm sites to clean up. This organization can't do it. They don't have the people power to do it and they don't want to do this forever. This should be left up to the government, but the question is, why have these fish farms been left abandoned and not cleaned up? Are there not laws to clean these up? Veronica had this to say. Indeed, we've been in very close contact with the local, regional and federal government as well. The law is in place. The implementation is missing. Why is it missing or why the law enforcement is missing? That's the question. I've heard experts saying that the best would be if in the future at the opening of any new facility, they put an amount of money in deposit. When you rent a room and the landlady is asking you to pay for two months in advance, something like that. Now we know the cost of the cleanups. Now we know the effort it takes. It's very easy to put a price on it and ask fish farming companies to have this deposit in place. If they don't clean it up themselves, then let's say the government or the authorities are going to take this money and spend it on the clean up itself. It sounds easy in theory, but why not? I did do a little digging in terms of some of the laws that are around, and there are laws that are built into environmental protection. They're built into aquaculture development legislation. They're built into code of conduct and voluntary standards. But none and even a spatial planning framework, but none of them have the wording or the policies to actually clean up the fish farms when they're done. You would think that businesses would just do it voluntarily. If they don't continue to farm fish in these areas that they would just say, "Okay, we're done. Let's clean it up." No, they just wash their hands and they just say, "Hey, we're just going to leave it here." One, they may not have the money to clean it up. It's expensive to do this. Like I said, 100 to 200,000 in and around that time, depending on where it's located and how hard it is to access. But they don't do it because they don't have the money or they've run out of time where they can't take care of the fish farm anymore, so they just leave it without any problems. Now, there are laws in place, but the enforcement is not great. And Veronica had this to say about the enforcement and maybe some future laws that should be put in place or future enforcement policies that should be put in place to help make sure that these ghost farms will be cleaned up in the future. In short, the Ministry of Environment has increased and also in other countries, something called an office which is examining environmental crimes. And they do agree that it's an environmental crime. The best thing they could advise us was to go to the police, file a report, maybe together with the local municipality and then this office will investigate the details, which is fine. But then in practical terms, it means a lot of time and money and again years at court. So it is not like we want to add another procedure on the top of the other five running procedures by doing this. So we decided to go another path. The cleanup is not the goal or not the only goal, like I mentioned. The cleanup is a tool to raise awareness and find ultimate solutions to this problem. We don't want to be and we cannot be the cleaners of ghost farms forever, right? Yeah, for sure. But we will continue to take action, not only with cleanups, but also community involvement, advocacy, educational programs. We run around it with university students who will be the future aquaculture engineers and workers. Right. So we do many different type of activities around the cleanups in order to place these ghost farm topics in a good position. Yeah, and find again, like I said, ultimate solutions to this. Veronica and healthy sees see a potential in cleaning up these sites as a way to bring about awareness of these ghost farms. So people have the understanding that these ghost farms exist and something needs to be done about them. The government needs to ensure that policy is laid out, so it's very clear that cleanup is part of managing a business with fish farms. To have fish farms just laid around and degrading into the environment, not an ideal situation. It makes the country look bad with these beautiful coastlines. Seeing the destruction and the degradation of these fish farms is not a good look, right? It's not a good look for the coastline that looks beautiful already. It should remain beautiful. And if you're going to do work in the ocean, you better clean it up. We've seen this in other industries like oil and gas where wastewater ponds are not cleaned up because it costs too much to clean up. And the government doesn't enforce the companies who actually created the wastewater ponds to clean up. We've seen that happen in Canada. We've seen it happen in other places. And it's just, it's sad. It's really sad to see because the local people who live there have to deal with all this stuff. The pollution, the health concerns, the environmental concerns. This is never a good look. If you're going to start a business where you are using natural resources or using some part of the environment, you should, and this is, I can't even believe I have to say this, you should have to have the responsibility to clean it up. Not only from a law perspective, but from an ethical perspective. But this just goes to show how some businesses and some people just act and that it is more about the money and the profit that it is about to clean up and the effect on local people. This is why it's so important to include local people in the creation or in the talks and discussions when something like a fish farm goes into a local area because people need to be made aware of what happens. And hopefully, and hopefully this video as well as the videos that Healthy Seas have put together in a very, very great way. I'll link to those in the show notes in the description. But hopefully these videos bring about awareness to get people, not only in Greece, but all over the world to ensure that when people work within the environment and have to use the environment to make a problem, they have the responsibility to clean it up afterwards. That's it for today's episode. I want to thank Healthy Seas, Veronica. I want to thank Samara, who has really been, you know, sort of the person who has given me all the information and the footage to be able to create this episode for you. I want to create more of these episodes like this for you. I'd love to hear what you thought of this type of episode, this type of structure. Please let me know. If you're listening to this on audio, feel free to go over to our YouTube channel where we have more footage. You can actually see the footage of the cleanup and you get a better sense of what goes in the equipment, the access, the people, the amount of people it takes to clean all of this up and the specialties that they have, like scuba diving and floats and all this kind of stuff and boats. It's expensive, it's a lot of people, and I thank the people who are doing this type of work that are working with Healthy Seas to do this. I want to thank Hyundai for helping out as well and help fund the project and partner on the project. I just want to thank you for listening and spreading this video around, making sure people see what is happening in Greece, and I'm sure this is other places as well. And I want to thank the government of Greece to be able to work with Healthy Seas to put in more policies that will help clean up these ghost farms. Thank you very much for joining me on this episode. If you want to DM me, you can do so at how to protect the ocean on Instagram. And of course, don't forget to subscribe and hit that notification bell to have more of these episodes coming right to you on your YouTube channel. And don't forget, we're on Spotify, Apple Podcast, everywhere. Thank you so much for joining me on today's episode of The How to Protect the Ocean Podcast. I'm your host, Andrew Lewin. Have a great day. We'll talk to you next time and happy conservation. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)
