Once again this summer, million tourists from Greece and all around the world enjoy swimming in the crystal waters of the Greek seas.

But are these seas as clean as they look?

The institute of sea protection 'Archipelagos' (http://archipelago.gr/en ) in cooperation with the University of Swansea from the Whales collected over 1.000 samples from 167 Greek coasts.

Surprisingly, the researchers did not find even one sample not containing tiny plastic fibers, called microplastics.

The size of this environmental problem can be verified by the fact that the concentration of microplastics was found to be more or less the same between the isolated coasts of uninhabited areas and the coasts near Athens. This phenomenon is mostly due to the sea currents:
http://archipelago.gr/en/actions-research-and-results

The second part of this research, which is still ongoing, has so far examined 350 fish samples from the north-eastern Aegean Sea and has found a shocking average of 4.68 microplastic fibers per fish. There was not a single fish without microplastics in it, and one was even found with 32 of them in it's stomach.

But where do all these microplastics come from?

Microplastics, tiny fragments of plastic with a size smaller than 5mm are formed when plastic pollutants break to smaller pieces because of physical and chemical reactions. Due to their size microplastics are invisible to human eye.

According to the environmental organization Five Gyres: (http://www.5gyres.org), the volume of plastic in all Oceans reaches 270.000 tones. These pollutants consist of 5.25 trillion pieces!!!
You can see Five Gyres's video at
https://vimeo.com/113359330

It is important to note that this evaluation is only about plastics floating without counting the ones which are on the bottom of the sea.

It is clear that this pollution does not only affect the beauty of the natural environment but also its toxicity.

The pollution of the marine life by plastics, mostly through fish and spineless organisms, passes to the food chain, with unpredictable consequences to the health of us humans, as well as other marine organisms.

In my little investigation, I was especially surprised by the contribution on of synthetic clothes to microplastics pollution. Researchers estimate that washing a synthetic cloth releases about 1900 microplastic fibers of size smaller than 1mm (microbeads)
http://www.treehugger.com/ocean-conservation/your-clothes-are-polluting-ocean-every-time-you-do-laundry.html
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es201811s

Years ago, scientists believed that plastic waste needed hundreds of years to decompose. However, modern research has shown that some common plastic types, usually met in plastic bags and water bottles, because of the ultraviolet radiation, the salt and the motion in the sea, decompose rapidly to very small pieces finally becoming microplastics.

In the Mediterranean Sea, today, it is estimated that 250 billion microplastics exist. This number is considered by environmental organizations as very serious, taking into consideration that the water of the Mediterranean Sea is recycled every 90 years and the rate of pollution is growing bigger and bigger.

According to the European Union, every Greek on average uses 270 plastic bags per year. The same average for the rest of the E.U. for 2010 was 500 bags a year! This means that every year 90 billion plastic bags are used, of which 92% are of single-use.
(http://www.zerowasteeurope.eu/category/plastic-bag )

Fortunately, since 2014 there has been a campaign to decrease single-use plastic packaging

In order to reduce the problem of sea pollution by microplastics, we have to maximize the plastic recycling process (today, according to the environmental organization Five Gyres, only about 5-10% of the plastic produced globally is recycled)

At the same time, there must be an effort from every responsible citizen to reduce as much as possible any plastic use in their every-day life. Lastly, it is important that we use natural instead of synthetic clothes which seem to greatly damage our seas with microplastics.