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In this part of Greece, these giant rings are everywhere. There's not much to see on the surface. But many of them are hiding a secret right below: they've been rotting here for years, spreading plastic across the coastline, and far into the ocean. And no one is talking about it. "It's an environmental crime. How can you go to bed at the end of the day and you're responsible for all this?" They're called ghost farms. And they're not only a Greek problem. Companies around the world are getting away with this.
Ghost farms like these are a growing part of the plastic waste that is filling oceans and seas everywhere. So getting rid of them is really important. The problem is that it's a long, messy and dangerous process. This is Veronika Mikos. She invited us to join her and her team in Methana, a small town a few hours drive from Athens. They're here to clean up a farm that's been here since 1993. "At the first glance it's tragic. You just don't know where to start.
Everywhere you look, I'm, like, what to touch first?!" It used to produce sea bass and sea bream, but from 2011, the company that ran it started running into licensing issues. The farm eventually shut down, but instead of removing it, the company just abandoned it instead. And this is just one of dozens of ghost farms in Greece alone that activists say were abandoned for bankruptcy, licensing issues, or other reasons. The same thing has been happening in Chile and Canada, and there's likely many more ghost farms that have simply not been identified yet. From above, these fish farms may look like they have little impact on their surroundings.
But they're actually huge pieces of infrastructure. The ones being cleaned up here go 40 meters down. And because most of it is made of plastic, when they're abandoned, they begin to break down, causing massive problems. The nets start to tangle, trapping and killing wild fish, which then attract and trap other fish, creating a cycle that could last for decades. Over time, the round cages collapse or separate. And the buoys crack and release the styrofoam they're filled with into the surrounding waters. To fish, this plastic happens to look a lot like food.
We went for a ride up the coastline to a beach 5km away, and along the way, we found styrofoam everywhere. Tassos Filippides runs a Greek NGO that finds ghost farms with satellite imagery. He also helps clean them up, which is why he's ready to go in a diving suit. "This is coming from a fish farm. All these are feeding bags. Fish feeding bags. And you see lots of fragments of these feeding bags.
This is a fragment, a styrofoam fragment. This has been a filler material for a buoy or a floatation tank. you can see it. I mean, it's very brittle. You can see all the material, sort of. I mean, you touch it and it goes." Tassos says it's impossible to say how much of this trash comes directly from the fish farm they're cleaning up. But some level of connection is almost undeniable. "What's that over there? That's a huge piece of debris there." "This thing is a connection rod that is used in the fish farm cages to connect the tubes that are on the base of the ring.
You can find quite a lot of them all over the coast. Nobody's ever going to collect them. So they just stay there for years and years. And they, they give away these microplastics in large quantities. So, they float in the water and they travel." Tassos says he's identified more than 130 possible abandoned locations in the areas he's reviewed, and confirmed at least 22 of them as ghost farms so far. And the original owners of most of them are known. " Is there any pressure or responsibility for them to be the ones cleaning this type of thing up?" "Well, legally yes, but the problem here is a law enforcement issue."
Under Greek law, companies that illegally abandon their fish farms can face fines and sanctions. To stop it from happening, companies are required to give a down-payment, which is returned at the end of their operations if they clean everything up. The original owners of this farm were told to remove it in 2022 by the local government. Two years later, they were fined 6,000 euros for still not cleaning it up. It's unclear if they ever paid that fine. So what about that downpayment? "Even if the state keeps the down payment, they feel that the money that they're going to lose, it's much, much less than the money they're going to spend
in order to, to repair the damage that they have created." "This farm behind me is not lost. It's just abandoned. So, there is an owner responsible for this, and the system around that owner who is not holding the owner responsible. So, it's an environmental crime." For now, Veronika says there's only one thing they can actually do about it: start cleaning. The divers are the first line of attack. "It's absolutely very dangerous. you need a special kind of person for that, who likes challenges."
First, they need to figure out the state that things are in after being left in the ocean for years. "The moment you start pulling nets, the visibility is zero. And you still have to figure out the puzzle underwater, you know." The sunken equipment is often buried under a layer of dirt, and interwoven with marine life like fish and mollusks, creating an unpredictable maze. The divers gather all the nets into a pile. The ropes that keep the cages in place are disconnected from the seafloor. Then, they attach balloons to bring everything to the surface in sections.
Once its all up, the last stage begins. The giant rings are slowly brought into this ship, the Typhoon, which specialises in removing marine waste. On the boat, things move very fast. This huge facility which had been left decaying for years was systematically broken down and disposed of within minutes. In the end it took five full days of work to remove all 18 sections of this fish farm. But it turns out the hard part was being allowed to do any of this in the first place. "How much support do you get from the government?" "Umm. the government is providing the green light for us to do this. So basically, they don't block us."
She's probably laughing because, despite the fact that they're cleaning up other people's problems for free, it seems like nobody here actually wants them to be doing it. Healthy Seas relies on funding from Hyundai and other sponsors to conduct these huge operations, which they say usually cost in the six-figures. "It took us more than a year to get an assignment from the government for this cleanup." Without getting that. "We could be blamed that we are stealing, a functional facility." That's exactly what happened a year ago,
when representatives of Healthy Seas and Ozon were sued by the owner of a different abandoned facility in Nafpaktos, claiming they had damaged half a million euro of his equipment'. The groups say they were given permission by the local government to clean the ghost farm there, and they have proof that it had been abandoned for more than 10 years. The court case is ongoing. But its pretty clear that, for the few people who are actually trying to deal with the problem, a year-long legal process just to get started, with the added threats of lawsuits once they actually do,
isn't making the job much easier. And while Greece's aquaculture industry, and the ghost farm issue that comes with it, is still relatively small, the country is looking to make it much bigger. An NGO opposed to industrial fish farms says the government is planning to expand the waters available for aquaculture by an average of 24x around the country, based on the contracts and legislation they've found. We asked the main Greek aquaculture group, HAPO, if there were any plans to change the industry's practices as it expanded so much.
They didn't get back to us. But one country that has already seen what happens when fish farming gets big is Chile. The country's aquaculture industry started growing rapidly in the 90s, briefly becoming the biggest marine aquaculture producer in the west in 2007. Since then, the country has seen a massive spike in floating marine debris linked to aquaculture, particularly styrofoam. And the industry there is still growing. But the country has started to acknowledge the risks that come with fish farming. Styrofoam buoys are now banned, with larger, air-filled alternatives being required instead. And alternative materials, like wood or even mushrooms, have been suggested to help the industry escape its addiction to cheap plastic.
For now, this ghost farm that had been haunting Methana's coastline is finally gone. But its legacy, the microplastics and debris that have already been carried far away by fish and ocean currents, will live on centuries longer than anyone here. " It's material that we breathe, it's material that we drink in our water, it's material that we eat in our food. mentality is going to change only if we make people understand what damage these few businesses are creating." " So is there anything big that's been abandoned causing pollution near you? Let us know in the comments below, don't forget to subscribe, and check out dw.com for more stories like this."
