July 8, 2020
Over 100 tons of ghost nets: that’s the catch of the Ocean Voyage Institute‘s sailing freighter KWAI. The ship spent 48 days looking for abandoned fishing nets in the Pacific Ocean. The cleanup mission was successful, and the non-profit organization now sets a record: the largest cleanup operation ever carried out on the open sea. The institute on Hawaii developed a simple method to detect ghost nets and remove them from the water. It is awe-inspiring how a small organization worked so effectively with few resources.
Abandoned fishing nets cause a lot of damage. Fishing nets made of plastic, such as nylon, are used all over the world and are much more durable than traditional rope nets. They are also cheaper and last much longer. The latter is a significant problem because if they are left at sea, they continue doing what they were made to do: catch and kill fish. Moreover, the nets pose a danger to other animals such as seals and turtles. The Ocean CleanUp calculated in 2018 that more than 46% of the weight of plastic in the ocean is accounted for by ghost nets.
How do you find ghost nets in the ocean? Unfinished work, you’d think. But Ocean Voyage Institute came up with a clever method. They asked ship crews to install a GPS tracker when they encountered a ghost net at sea. That tracker makes it easy to track a net. Because of the sea currents, nets are often found near each other, and so one marked net leads to the other.
Photo: Ocean Voyage Institute
The European cosmetics industry is misleading consumers and governments. The industry stated in 2018 that the use of plastic microbeads had decreased by 97.6% and pledged that no more personal care products with plastic microbeads would be sold by 2020. However, such products are still offered for sale, according to scientific research.
Journalist Laura Hoogenraad has been researching the reuse of old, shredded carpets full of chemicals in horse riding arenas, and this is what she found out:
In children’s playgrounds, industrial waste full of toxic substances is being used as part of the “circular economy”.
For the first time, scientists have found microplastics in the placenta. Recent research has also shown that babies consume 1.6 million microplastics daily via food from plastic bottles.
Plastic-free July: 7 ‘R’s to a plastic-free lifestyle