Plastic waste in the country’s rivers and streams will be searched for in the coming months…plastic pirates“. It is an initiative based on the so-called “citizen science” and scientifically supported in Greece Hellenic Center for Marine Research (ELKETHE) as well as Aegean University. The goal of the campaign, which is developing in parallel in many European countries, is to record the “leakage” of plastic and other waste into the rivers of the continent.

The campaign started yesterday at Valanari Creek in Pikermi with the participation of 25 students from High School 3 from Koropi High School 3. Its coordinator in Greece is Konstantinos Sarandakos, Head of ELKETHE Learning Support. As he explains, under the guidance of experts from ELKETHE and Aegean University, the students were divided into groups and collected waste from the stream bed according to a certain procedure. They then divided them into categories, weighed them, and recorded them to calculate the proportion of each type of waste per unit area. A group of children photographed the process and waste and tried to identify sources of contamination. “With the help of teachers, the children will process the collected data and upload it to the online platform. We will then confirm that this is indeed real data by adding our own data on microplastics in the water when samples are taken from there. The data will be uploaded to a pan-European interactive map where it will be available to everyone,” explains Mr. Sarandakos.

The action is part of the all-European campaign Plastic Pirates – Go Europe! The initiative started in 2016 in Germany and gradually spread throughout Europe with the support of the European Commission. In Greece, coordination is carried out by ELKETHE and actions are supported by the General Secretariat for Research and Technology and the Ministry of Education. “Promotions will continue as long as the weather permits, they will be interrupted for the winter and repeated from spring in different parts of Greece. This is a good experience for children, which introduces them to the problem and shows them what methodology the researcher should work with,” concludes Mr. Sarandakos. “As for the children who participated in yesterday’s action, I think they were impressed by the amount of various garbage found.”