Greek Shipping Giants Tout Pollution Initiatives in New Documentary

Illustration. BIRN/Igor Vujcic

Major players in global shipping, the Laskaridis brothers are known in Greece for their initiatives to clean the seas of rubbish and scrap single-use plastics.

The documentary, Fishing for Litter, looks at one such initiative, yet in May 2021 BIRN revealed that inspectors in October 2019 registered 11 violations on one of the Laskaridis ships, a reefer called Avunda, after it had spent a month in the protected waters of Antarctica, including concerns over its air pollution certificate and oil filtering equipment.

The following year, Greenpeace flagged the Avunda in a report detailing the dangers reefers pose to the highly sensitive waters of Antarctica. Reefers have a high failure rate in port inspections and dominate so-called transhipping, the practice of transferring a catch from one vessel to another, usually from a fishing ship to a reefer. The practice is closely monitored in port, but not so much far offshore, where illegal catches can be concealed.

The Laskaridis brothers deny having anything to do with illegal cargo and say the faults found by inspectors are minor and quickly rectified.

The documentary, made by well-known Greek journalist Sotiris Danezis with the support of the Athanasios C. Laskaridis Charitable Foundation, follows four fishermen who, besides catching fish, seek out plastic bottles and rubbish on the seabed.

"If we fish now from the Dardanelles to Piraeus, we will catch two fish, 10 barrels, a hundred bottles, and a thousand bits of garbage," a fisherman from Kavala called Dimitris says in the film. Together, the four men retrieved 2.5 tons of litter from the sea last year.

They are among 40 fishermen collaborating with the foundation in the Fishing for Litter...