Greece’s massive coastline, the largest in the Mediterranean, is tainted by huge amounts of plastic waste, styrofoam, nets and other debris, endangering the marine environment and forcing visitors to either avoid or spent less time on polluted beaches. But for the past six years, “Typhoon,” the flagship vessel of the Typhoon Project has been changing that, cleaning up coast after coast and removing debris piece by piece with a focus on remote and hard-to-access beaches.
The Typhoon Project was launched in 2019 by the Athanasios C. Laskaridis Charitable Foundation, with the aim of cleaning up the entire Greek coastline and giving back clean shores to the people of Greece and its visitors.
The driver of all this is the “Typhoon,” a modern, Norwegian-built, 72-meter vessel that sails year round, decontaminating the coasts and transporting the waste collected to recycling or proper disposal facilities. It has five speed boats to clean inaccessible shores, large containers suitable for sorting recyclables, and a permanent crew of 35.
Six years on, the results are beyond impressive. To visualize the scale of the debris collected, the Foundation explains that the total volume exceeds that of iconic European monuments, such as Big Ben and the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
The “Typhoon” team has cleaned over 3,748 beaches, covering 841,000 linear meters of coastline and removing 768 tons of waste, measuring more than 35,670 cubic meters in volume. A staggering 17,862,000 pieces of litter have been collected, ranging from tiny styrofoam pieces to massive tires and ghost nets. Much of this waste is believed to originate from land-based sources or poorly managed fish farms, an issue that urgently requires state intervention.
After the second round of cleanups, which began in February 2023, the previously cleaned areas showed an improvement of 80 percent. In Paros and Thasos improvement hit 100 percent, while beaches in Crete showed a 78 percent improvement.
The Typhoon Project collaborates with the Laboratory of Marine Geology and Physical Oceanography of the Department of Geology of the University of Patras, as well as with the Marine Remote Sensing Group of the University of the Aegean.
“Typhoon” cleans Greece’s polluted shoreline as beaches across the country drown in plastic
A report published by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) in March 2025 paints a bleak picture of the pollution that’s taking a hold of Greece’s beaches. From data collected across 192 beaches in the country between 2021 and 2024, all exceed the maximum threshold of 20 pieces of trash for every 100 meters of coast to be considered clean, according to the relevant European directive. Instead, WWF’s study detected an average of 464 pieces of trash for every 100 meters of coast, a number that’s more than 20 times above the requirements. In total, 298,000 pieces of trash were collected from the 192 beaches studied between 2021 and 2024.
What makes the report’s findings even more worrisome is that the vast majority of trash found (83 percent) is plastic, with cigarette butts holding the top spot, followed by plastic caps, plastic bottles, plastic bags, pieces of styrofoam and others.
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