NH Marine Debris to Energy Project

A New Hampshire-based project to study marine debris at sea and on the shore, incorporating waste-to-energy and recycling as part of cleanup efforts.

Marine Debris to Energy Project Staff Attend Derelict Fishing Gear Workshop in Boston

By Jen Kennedy, Blue Ocean Society for Marine Conservation

Our Marine Debris to Energy Project may be the only one in New Hampshire, but it joins many other innovative efforts across the U.S. that are working to combat the problem of derelict fishing gear.

Derelict fishing gear refers to nets, lines, lobster/crab/shrimp traps, buoys and other recreational or commercial fishing equipment and associated debris that has been lost, abandoned or discarded in the marine environment.

On Tuesday, November 19, I went down to Boston with fellow project staff members Ken La Valley from NH Sea Grant and Mike Toepfer from UNH Cooperative Extension to attend a workshop at the New England Aquarium hosted by the non-profit organization Stellwagen Alive. The objectives of the workshop were to understand the issues and implications of derelict fishing gear, develop a framework for addressing the issues, and form a Northeast working group/consortium on derelict fishing gear.

Derelict gear is a problem because it poses a threat to people and wildlife and is difficult to retrieve from the open ocean. Below are some facts and statistics related to derelict fishing gear:

Derelict gear out in the ocean is called “ghost gear” because it continues to catch marine life even though no human is actively using the gear. The gear continues fishing for years and catches marine mammals, seabirds, fish and invertebrates, and also catches healthy predators who come to feed on the decaying organisms that have been caught. Gear like nets can also smother a habitat if they drift to the ocean bottom.

In Puget Sound, Washington, the Northwest Straits Initiative (www.nwstraits.org) removed 939 gillnets, in which they found 35,930 live and dead animals including 22 dead marine mammals, 378 dead birds, 1,022 live and dead fish, and 29,517 live and dead invertebrates.

Fishermen can spend hours in a season untangling their gear from ghost gear, amounting to many hours of lost fishing time.

In one project in Massachusetts, fisherman Frank Mirarchi of Scituate logged the hours he spent dealing with ghost gear for 14 months, and during this time he collected 5,600 pounds of debris and spent 14 hours dealing with it. He estimated this amounted to about $8,000 in lost revenues.

One issue examined in depth in this workshop is the legal issues around retrieval and disposal of gear. As anyone who’s been to one of our beach cleanups knows, lost gear like lobster traps belongs to the fishermen, so volunteers or other fishermen cannot remove them without special permits. This is a difficult issue that we’re hoping to address in New Hampshire in the coming months.

Since derelict gear is such an overwhelming problem, it was great to see so many groups working toward its retrieval and prevention. In many ways, it felt like our project is ahead of the curve, thanks to the backing of the members of the Yankee Fishermen’s Co-op who been placing derelict gear in our waste-to-energy bin since April (recycling over 3 tons of gear so far!), our cleanup volunteers who have been dutifully removing bits of rope and line and piling up lobster traps on the beaches, and folks who have taken the time to recycle their fishing line in our monofilament fishing line recycling bins. We look forward to continuing to expand our project web site, collecting more debris information, and mapping it soon via GIS so debris maps and reports for the New Hampshire area are readily accessible to the public and resource managers.

This study is funded by NH Sea Grant and through a grant from the NOAA Marine Debris Program.
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