Supporting a popular tourist island to eliminate plastic waste

The Greek island of Paros sees at least a 350% increase in volume of waste between April and October – the tourist season. Much of this waste is single-use plastic, and too much of it ends up on beach and in the sea. This damages local ecosystems and threatens the island’s main source of income – tourism.

Understanding the plastic problem

To solve a problem, you must first understand it. On Paros, we investigated the island’s unique plastic pollution problem by working with waste managers, and social and marine scientists. We explored how people perceive plastic, how it ‘flows’ around the island, and which items most commonly end up in our ocean. We used Plastic Drawdown to help us do this and to identify the right portfolio of interventions.

With this insight, we started piloting creative and practical upstream solutions to radically reduce these problematic plastics. Our on-the-ground team built innovative partnerships with local government, business and the community:

• Worked with over 100 hospitality businesses to help them measure and reduce or eliminate single-use plastics.
• Designed a reusable cup deposit-return scheme that will design out coffee cup waste altogether.
• Conducted community-led beach litter audits to understand the plastics entering Paros’ beaches and sea.
• Installed gamified ashtrays to stop the littering of cigarette butts on Paros.
• Improved the placement of bins across the island to decrease landfill and increase recycling.
• Established a community enterprise model to make stylish reusable bags using waste textiles from hotel bedsheets.
• Launched Community Dishes – a reuse solution – to remove single-use plastics from island festivals. In its first use, this solution prevented the use of 50,000 single-use plastic items at a single event.
• Incentivised the use of tap water by testing its quality, installing water filters in schools, and raising awareness through water bills and a comms campaign, including a ‘Drink Tap’ video shown on local ferries.
• Installed water filtration systems in schools and donated reusable metal bottles to students. This will prevent around 783,000 single-use plastic bottles becoming waste every year. Through the Ocean Plastics Academy (now Plastic Clever Schools), we supported teachers and students to learn about and reduce other single-use plastics in their schools – embedding behaviour change for the long term.

As well as stopping plastic waste at source, we also worked to stop plastic becoming waste. This meant partnering with businesses and local government to implement a separate collection service for the island’s most prolific plastic pollutants.

To engage the community, we ran public communication and behaviour change campaigns for locals and tourists.

The success of this pilot project in Paros was built on partnership and collaboration. We are grateful to Paros Municipality, the Cyclades Preservation Fund, WATT, WWF Greece and the many local businesses, groups and individuals who supported our work.