Greece fights for its beaches and gets tough on plastic pollution

Greece announced a campaign on Wednesday to tackle plastic pollution and promised to stop the use of single-use plastics by June 2020.

“39 tonnes of plastic waste end up in the sea in Greece and a lot of it turns into fish food,” Environment Minister Kostis Hatzidakis said at a press conference.Greece has a coastline that stretches over 130,000 kilometers and plastics in the oceans affects its marine wildlife all along the food chain.

Hatzidakis said he hoped for “a gradual stop” of single-use plastics by 2020, a year before the EU ban.He also announced a plan to cooperate with the A.C. Laskaridis Charitable Foundation, a private environmental group. Last year, the foundation worked with the Greek island of Sikinos in the Aegean sea to ban plastic straws, which are widely used in the summer for drinking iced coffee.

According to the group, Greece imports about 700,000 tonnes of raw plastic materials each year and discards 40,000 tonnes of plastic, of which 70 percent ends up on the coast.Greece lags behind its EU neighbours in recycling rubbish, especially plastics. The country was late to adopt a plastic bag fee in shops in January 2018.

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