Plastic.
Plastic Bags.
Plastic bottles.
Plastic wraps.
Plastic Toys.
Microplastic.
Plastic everything.
We find it everywhere and it’s near impossible
to find a human-occupied space without it.
News headlines constantly warn us of what happens
when we discard single-use plastics.
A quick Google image search shows beaches and ocean
patches covered in bottles and wildlife choking on
straws and clear bags.
Thousands of NGOs are dedicated to cleaning up
garbage patches and others sell recycled accessories
in order to save money for the cause.
And of course, there's cause for concern.
According to research from the University of Georgia,
our species has produced a whopping 8.3 billion
metric tons of plastic as of 2015.
To give you an idea of what that looks like,
it’s the equivalent of 822,000 Eiffel Towers
floating around in earth’s oceans.
Their prediction is that by 2050,
the number will reach 12 billion tons.
But plastic bottles and six-pack rings
aren’t the only enemies of our oceans.
One of the lesser known threats to marine life is
Ghost Gear.
You’re watching Explore Mode and today
we’re going underwater to explore
what exactly Ghost Gear is.
Ghost gear is not as easy to spot as
common plastic waste, hence its name.
The gear mentioned refers to abandoned fishing gear.
That is nets, long lines, hooks, fish traps, lobster pots,
and any man-made fishing equipment that’s been lost
or discarded at sea.
The problem with ghost gear is not only that they will
take about 600 years to break down —
they are engineered to withstand harsh marine
conditions after all —
but that they were designed to catch marine life
and they continue to catch fish,
even after being discarded for years.
This is known as ghost fishing.
You see, the tangled mess of nets can become quite big,
trapping any critter that’s unfortunate enough to
swim into them.
Ghost nets create a deadly cycle:
The corpses of smaller ensnared animals
attract larger predators who then become caught
themselves, and so the cycle goes on.
The absolute worst type of nest is the gill net,
also known as the drift net.
It is essentially a wall of mesh with holes
roughly the size of certain fishes’ heads,
some float just below the waters’ surface and
others are placed near the seabed.
Once a fish swims into the wall,
its head gets caught by the gills.
Wiggling will only trap it even more.
Animals who are “lucky” enough to escape from gillnets
end up dragging the gear with them and
eventually may die of extreme fatigue or infection
from their wounds.
Gill nets are so detrimental to marine life,
they’ve been banned from international waters
by the UN.
Data from the UK's World Animal Protection shows that
100,000 whales, dolphins, seals and turtles die or suffer
injuries due to ghost gear each year.
In 2016, a North Atlantic Right Whale was trapped and
died while tangled in ghost nets.
These whales are critically endangered.
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration, there are only 450 left.
But how much of this gear is really haunting the ocean?
Available data estimates there is roughly 600,000 to
800,000 metric tons of derelict gear
entering earth’s oceans each year.
And if you think this is a new problem that we’ve just
stumbled upon, we are sorry to say that it’s not.
Ghost fishing was first mentioned during the
16th Session of the FAO Committee on Fisheries.
That was in 1985, over 30 years ago.
Now, let's get some perspective,
we'll sail over to the Pacific Ocean and take a look.
Nestled between Hawaii and California resides
the Great Pacific garbage patch,
the biggest out of four massive trash nests
in our oceans.
It covers roughly 1.6 million square kilometers,
that’s three times the size of France.
As for its mass, the GPG weighs about 80,000 tons —
the equivalent to 500 Jumbo Jets.
The plastic floating inside the patch is classified into
four groups:
Type H, which is any plastic in sheets,
film or just plain hard plastic.
Type P, or pre-production plastics
which are the raw plastic material usually in the form of
pellets, cylinders or disks.
Type F, which are the bits and pieces made of styrofoam
or other foamed materials and
Type N, which is made up of plastic lines, fishing nets,
and ropes.
This, of course, is the category where ghost gear falls in.
And according to The Ocean Cleanup,
ghost gear makes up 46 percent of the
Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
That’s almost half of all the floating trash.
Check out this graph created by The China Dialogue
Ocean using data from The Global Ghost Gear Initiative.
Each dot represents the location of reported
missing gear from April 1981 to October 2018.
During that time 46,000 items were lost,
more than half were not retrieved and for all we know
are still lost at sea.
But it’s not all doom and gloom.
Groups of activists dedicated to cleaning up the ocean
often go on ghostbusting expeditions,
diving deep to remove ghost nets from the sea bed.
On June 18, a crew from a Californian cargo ship
removed 40 tons of ghost nets as it cruised the
Pacific Ocean for a month,
making it the largest Pacific Ocean clean-up to date.
40 tons in a month.
That’s over a ton per day.
You don’t need to sail across the ocean in
a cargo ship to find ghost gear though.
In May, Dutch and Greek divers retrieved two metric tons
of fishing gear from a section in Greece’s northern coast.
A group of just 15 volunteers in Hawaii removed
4,000 pounds of ghost nets off of Lanikai Beach.
Sadly, there more than enough ghost gear out there for
humans to deal with.
So how can we deal with ghost gear?
Well, according to the Global Ghost Gear Initiative
and the United Nations Environment Program
educating fisheries about the impact of ghost gear
is a great place to start.
Apart from that, marking fishing gear during
manufacturing could help in the process of retrieving
them should they get lost.
Using biodegradable materials to make fishing pots
and other gear could also help minimize the
environmental impact of traps that become
stranded and make it easier for them to be recycled or
reused when removed.
Fishing gear producers could also provide incentives
for fishermen to return old and discarded nets and
report lost equipment.
Some countries and companies have already been
implementing these types of programs for years.
A good example of this is South Korea.
The Asian country started its derelict gear buyback
program back in 2003 in several of its towns and cities,
paying fishermen in exchange for some types of
fishing gear.
The NOAA Marine Debris Program works side by side
with fisheries by connecting them with ports where
they can discard their fishing gear for free.
So far, the program has collected 2.1 million pounds of
ghost gear from 41 areas in the United States.
Bureo, a California-company, has taken a creative take
on ghost net recycling.
Using derelict nets, the company makes surfing gear,
skateboards, sunglasses and even collaborated with
Jenga to create a version of the classic family game
made of recycled fishing nets.
Another company called Ghost Nets Australia,
uses the discarded gear as the weaving material
to create mats, bags, baskets and other types of
indigenous art.
They also have an online database where communities
living in coastal cities can research what types of nets
have washed into their shores.
Ironically, ghost gear also affects the fishing industry.
In the words of Nick Mallos, Director of the Trash Free
Seas Program at Ocean Conservancy,
“When there is a large amount of ghost gear out there,
it affects fishers’ bottom lines,
it affects the future sustainability of otherwise
harvestable catch, and often it prevents them from
spending more time on the water.”
There you have it.
Unfortunately, Not all fisheries would respond positively
to these solutions.
One of the biggest hurdles for ghost gear is
illegal fishing.
Often times, fishermen onboard illegal fishing vessels
will purposely discard their equipment into the ocean
to avoid being detected or paying fines.
And with illegal fishing not being regulated,
that leaves us with a constant flux of unaccounted
for ghost gear.
Thanks again for watching explore mode
and for — literally — diving deep with us this time.
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