Among the fishermen of San Benedetto collecting plastic: “We are outlawed, but let’s save the sea”

SAN BENEDETTO DEL TRONTO (AP) – The light of the fishing boat Franco Giacoponi in the darkness of the sea is getting brighter and brighter. Although it is past midnight, there is movement on the pier of San Benedetto del Tronto: the port service workers prepare the forklift for the transport of the catch and there are also some curious ones. When waste such as tangled nets and rusty metal cans are unloaded from the boat before the boxes with the fish, a man who is there with a child tells him: “See, these are the fishermen who also clean the sea”.

The fishermen of San Benedetto are the symbol of those who, despite the absence of precise rules, take care of the sea. Their fame is also due to Pope francesco, who often mentions them. He also did so last July 9, the day in which Sea Sunday is celebrated, in the Angelus: “I thank the sailors who protect the sea from various forms of pollution, in addition to their work – said Bergoglio – and remove from the sea the dirt we throw away, the plastic… Once the fishermen of San Benedetto del Tronto told me about the tons of plastic they removed from the sea…”.

The approximately 200 fishermen of San Benedetto are not the only ones in Italy who, in the absence of the implementing decrees of the Salvamare Law, are making an effort to bring waste ashore. But what makes their project special, as he says Don Giuseppe Giudici, port chaplain for nine years, “is that experimentation has turned into conscience, into convinced civil commitment”. If in San Benedetto there is a father who shows his son the fishermen who clean the sea, according to Don Peppe, as everyone here calls the 45-year-old parish priest of Acquaviva Picena, it is because their example has taken root. “It has become a way of saying – says the priest – in San Benedetto del Tronto if they see you throwing something on the ground they say ‘But how, the fishermen even collect the garbage from the sea and you throw it like this?'”.

The project that Pope Francis likes

Don Peppe has a great role in this story of environmental commitment and ability to communicate it. It is he who maintains contact with the fishermen, and it is he who first spoke to Bergoglio about the project CleanSea Life in 2019. “I had been received with other chaplains of the sea and I told him what we were doing. Then, seeing that he had quoted us, I spoke with the bishop to bring the fishermen to a private audience with the Pope: When we asked him to meet us, he replied immediately – he says – and he also let us choose the date. We went to him on January 18, 2020. I always say that in some ways they have always been polluters, instead now you see the three buckets for recycling on the fishing boats. They are more attentive to their waste and in addition they remove those left by others”.

Don Peppe loves the sea and his land, he was born not far from here, in Cupra Marittima and between greeting a parishioner in difficulty who asks him for alms and answering a message on his cell phone, he confesses: “I would like to much to be able to make San Benedetto del Tronto the first port to ban polystyrene fish boxes, but it is a bit of a fight against windmills.There are also legitimate economic interests that must be respected, but even if the fishermen they are careful not to let them end up in the water they are brittle, they break and they fly with the wind. You don’t know how many I have happened to collect when they are at sea”.

From experimentation to everyday life: SeaClean Life

If Don Peppe is the heart of the San Benedetto project, Eleanor De Sabatafounder of the MedShark association and journalist, with Leonardo Collina, managing director of Picenambiente, are the masterminds. It is to them that we owe the initiation of the experimentation which has become practice. In fact, in 2019, it is De Sabata who coordinates the European SeaClean Life project for the Marches, within which the fishermen and local authorities of Porto Torres, Manfredonia, Rimini and, precisely, San Benedetto del Tronto, are involved for a month in “waste fishing” projects, to identify a virtuous model for managing objects collected at sea.

The experimentation has an important practical objective: among the knots that the implementing decrees of the Salvamare law must resolve there is in fact the problem of the disposal and collection costs of the waste brought ashore. The SeaClean Life project, thanks to the collaboration with Piceambiente, for the first time, in addition to collecting the waste unloaded from fishing boats in special bins, has cataloged them and calculated what can be recycled and how much it costs to do it. And there’s a surprise: Picenambiente has understood that in the face of a huge return on image (in addition to the service rendered to the community) the cost is negligible.

In fact, Collina di Picenambiente says: “We are waste collectors in the port area and we have joined the project by stipulating a program agreement, in order to legalize what still cannot be done due to the lack of implementing decrees. Ours is a public company with a turnover of 30 million euros, small compared to other companies, but we have made ourselves available, with our plastic sorting plant, to separate the waste collected at sea, subject it to product analysis to understand what was being collected and what percentage could be recycled”.

Collina’s work with Picenambiente has also reached Parliament: “We have provided our data to the parliamentary commission, hoping to make a contribution to Salvamare and some advice. It is essential to make unloading easier for fishermen, because it is an activity that they they would do it regardless and if they don’t do it, no one does it.In the absence of the implementing decrees, as a society we continue to collect this type of waste as good practice, also because we have understood that it costs us 180 euros to dispose of a ton of waste, very little Since we still go to the port to collect all the port waste, it’s not a problem for us”.

Do not think that Picenambiente can recycle and profit from what the fishermen collect: “It is highly contaminated waste – explains the managing director – most necessarily end up in landfills, but the important thing is that above all the plastics do not remain to deteriorate at sea”. And there is already a first result: “Since bottom trawling more or less always follows the same routes, now the amount of waste brought ashore has decreased a bit”, concludes Collina.

Eleonora De Sabata confirms that passion, organization and good will unite in San Benedetto, as only sometimes happens. “In fact, there was enormous availability in the town in the Marche region, the fishermen, the harbor master’s office and companies such as CNH industrial and FPT industrial. The project, which had to be completed in 30 days, has become four months and now a habit. The draftsman of the law Save the sea Paula Deiana she came to visit us and we were invited to Parliament to tell our experience, the fishermen’s enthusiasm has thus turned into a habit. The implementing decrees are still missing, but everything goes on tacitly”.

The fisherman: “We do it because our future is at stake”

It is afternoon, the Rapepè, a small 14-metre fishing boat, docks at the port. The shipowner Peter Ricci unloads the catch and confirms: “On our routes, thanks to the work done, we collect less and less plastic – he says – but we continue to bring waste ashore. For us, the safeguarding of our work also depends on this commitment, we did it even before but now we know we can dispose of it easily: before, when we tried to unload what we had collected in the sea, they told us that it was waste made by us. We are sorry that they make us trawlers look like destroyers, our activities impact by two centimeters on the bottom in the face of a work of protection and enormous knowledge of the sea”.

However, as a connoisseur of the sea, Ricci warns of an imminent danger, which confirms how important it is to implement every aspect of the Salvamare also as regards the control of what arrives from the rivers: “It is true that we find less and less waste, but unfortunately we expect the flood wave in Emilia Romagna, where the floods poured tons and tons of polluting materials into the sea. We will also collect those in the coming months. Our survival depends on it: we must bear in mind that waste can also cause damage to engine system, a citizen who throws a plastic bag or bottle into the sea should be aware of the damage it can do to the environment and our activities”.

Meanwhile, the Salvamare law remains at a standstill

The fortunate alchemy that still makes the San Benedettese project work could become practice everywhere, but despite the appeals to the government and the commitment made by the Minister of the Sea, Nello Musumeci, the implementing decrees are not there. “Our life on the planet depends on the health of the oceans and the presence of plastic waste in the sea now presents a very serious threat to this precious ecosystem everywhere, from the most remote depths to the beaches – he underlines Maria Rapini, general secretary of Marevivo Marche – Fishermen now recover more plastic than fish in their nets every day. And that’s not all. The micro fragments that we see with the naked eye are dispersed in the waters or already ingested by the same animals which then become food on our tables. The Salvamare law which allows fishermen to bring recovered plastic ashore and provides for the installation of waste collection systems in line with the principles of the circular economy, as requested by the European Union, could be a useful and concrete tool but one year after its approval, this law is not yet operational because there are no implementing decrees. Marevivo has mobilized on this front and is asking the government to act urgently to implement the Salvamare regulations. An awareness is needed to protect the health of the sea and, consequently, our own survival!”.