Divers discover 'gulf full of plastic corals' in the Aegean
Like colourful corals, they swayed in the underwater current.
Only these were not natural reefs built up over centuries, but plastic bags, stuck to the golden Aegean seabed.
Thousands of plastic bags were pulled from the sea off Greece's Andros island this month by a team of divers and environmentalists who described what they found as a "gulf full of plastic corals."
"If you can imagine the paradise of the Caribbean seas where you can find coral reefs everywhere of every colour, it was the exact same thing but instead of corals it was bags. It was a very scary thing to see," said Arabella Ross, a volunteer diver with Aegean Rebreath, a group founded in 2017 to carry out underwater and coastal clean-ups.
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Aegean Rebreath divers plucked dozens of kilograms of blue, black and yellow plastic bags tangled between reefs, swaying among fish, as well as other plastic waste.
The team also removed 300 kilograms of discarded fishing nets from Andros and Salamina island. They only managed to clean up a fraction of the plastic waste they found, said Ross.
The sea pollution off Andros is thought to date back to 2011, when heavy rain caused an informal waste disposal site to collapse, with most of the materials tumbling into the sea.
Seas polluted with plastic have become one of the most shocking symbols world-wide of mankind's damage to the planet.
Greece produces about 700,000 tonnes of plastic waste a year, or about 68 kilos per person, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) said in a report in June. About 11,500 tonnes end up in its seas every year, and almost 70 per cent of that returns to its coastline, one of the longest in the world.
Micro-plastics find their way into the food chain and are consumed by fish, ending up on dinner tables, said Ross.
