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Abandoned, Lost, or Discarded Fishing Gear (ALDFG) are huge ocean pollutant, accounting for **80% of the plastic** in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. This “ghost gear” affects 66% of marine animals and 50% of seabirds through entanglement and ingestion. The direct effect on wildlife and our fisheries is directly solvable with policies and education, however once the waste is brought and collected it has nowhere to go.

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Our project focuses on improving the processing of ALDFG. Thermal processing uses heat to break down nylon from discarded gear (mainly nets), turning it into reusable materials. Current systems are not portable, which leads to major transportation expenses. Our vision is to turn the recycling unit into a portable system. This would allow processing to happen on-site, cutting costs and making cleanup efforts more practical and scalable.

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An estimated 640,000 tons of fishing gear are lost or abandoned globally

Abandoned, lost, or otherwise discarded fishing gear (ALDFG) makes up around 10% of ocean plastic pollution. ALDFG consists mainly of durable synthetic materials like nylon, polypropylene, and other fish line materials, meant to withstand long and rough use for fishing. The durability is perfect for fishers, but fishing gear is often lost or discarded, because of either bad policy or no incentive.

ALDFG include:

• Nets
• Fishing lines
• Buoys
• Ropes
• Traps and Pots

The amount of ALDFG are expected to increase proportionally with fishing fleet expansion and aqua culture practices. This increase added to the existing amount of ALDFG, which can remain in the ecosystem for decades, and cause ghost fishing. It acts almost like ghost fisherman, by trapping and killing marine organisms without human intervention, reducing fish stocks by up to 30%.

ALDFG’s impact ranges from ecosystem’s health to economic impacts across multiple industries

• Marine Mortality
• Pollution
• Habitat Destruction
• Economic Impact

There is hope however, as policies are becoming more common, such as the Global Ghost Gear Initiative (GGGI), which provides funding and creates workshops (such as NANCI) to educate fisheries and make policy that outlines their responsibility, and provides training sessions. ALDFG gets collected and brought ashore, and any strays found get reported to be cleaned up in the future. It’s an efficient system that is backed by both US and Canadian companies and the government.

To see more information about the problem, look here: Notes

When collected, the process of recycling the waste into valuable products are underdeveloped and localized

When ALDFG are properly retrieved, it is critical to ensure that they do not end up polluting the ocean again or just end up in landfills. This is where we can recycle fishing gear, such as nylon nets. However, the methods are not always cost-effective. There are a myriad of factors, but one of the biggest costs come from the transportation of ALDFG.

• ALDFG are often collected from remote marine environments, making it a challenge to have the right machinery to collect the them. The time and energy spent reaching the area, which may be in the middle of the ocean, retrieving the ALDFG, transporting them back to land, and then paying a middleman to deliver them to the recycling facility adds up to a significant cost (up to 80k just in transport with time, salary, fuel).
• There is also the factor that these ALDFG may have a large volume and weight ratio. This increases the transportation costs, especially if there were detections of multiple high concentrations of ALDFG, or if multiple trips are required to transport all of it from the port, to the facility, to it’s final destination.