‘The blue flags are proof’: how Greece cleaned up its act on sewage

theguardian.com:

The shimmering waters along the Athenian riviera offer a welcome respite in the summer heat. In one of Europe’s most congested cities the sight of ever more beaches attaining blue flag status – a mascot of water quality – has heightened the sense of relief that the coastal location affords. For those who flock to its coves, rocks and sandy stretches, the shoreline that extends from the Greek capital’s southern suburbs has become the perfect antidote to the rising temperatures that have accompanied climate breakdown.

It was not always so.

“More than 20 years ago the waters around Attica [peninsula] weren’t for bathing as they definitely weren’t as clean,” says Prof Konstantinos Aravossis who until earlier this year oversaw water management policies at the Greek ministry of environment. “They are now because a lot of emphasis was put on improving wastewater treatment plants and that, of course, had a lot to do with regulations in the EU.”

The establishment in the mid-1990s of a sewage plant on the uninhabited Saronic Gulf isle of Psyttaleia, off the port of Piraeus – an installation serving the 5 million residents of the greater Athens area and one of the largest in the world – is widely acknowledged as being a game-changer.

“The blue flags that we see today in Attica are proof of just how much better the situation is,” says Aravossis, who now heads the ministry of environment’s forestry department.

But with one of the longest coastline on the continent, Greece also takes its seas seriously. At last count Europe’s southernmost state had 581 blue flag beaches – second only to the 621 in Spain. In 2021, the EU’s environmental watchdog classified nearly 96% of monitored bathing sites in Greece as excellent.

A visiting professor at