Ghost nets pulled from the Pacific in biggest ever clean-up at sea

Over 40 tonnes of ‘ghost nets’ have been fished out of the sea by conservationists in what’s being called the largest ever Pacific Ocean clean-up at sea.

Abandoned or lost commercial fishing equipment is said to account for nearly half of all the material in the so-called Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and floating ‘ghost nets’ account for catching and killing thousands of marine animals.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is the name for an area between California and Hawaii where ocean currents have concentrated the greatest volumes of waste plastic. Contrary to popular belief there’s no ‘floating trash island’, but estimates of plastic concentration vary from 100s of kgs per square kilometre at the centre of the patch, to 10kgs at its extremities. The patch itself extends over 1.6 million square kilometres – or three times the size of France. There are estimated to be 80,000 tonnes of plastic in the patch, or 1.8 trillion individual plastic pieces – that’s 250 pieces for every human in the world.

“The problem with plastic is it just lasts forever. So these nets continue killing marine life until they’re taken out of the ocean,” Mary Crowley, the founder of Ocean Voyages Institute which carried out the clean-up, told Hawaii News Now.

The not-for-profit organisation started handing out GPS tracking devices to mariners a year ago, asking them to attach the trackers to abandoned nets.

Ocean Voyages Institute hopes to ramp up its operations over coming years, but to do so needs to find money for many more of the trackers which cost over £1,000 a piece.

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