Angela Riley started cleaning up trash from shorelines in Halifax in the summer of 2020.
“I had a lot of eco-depression going on due to climate change. It’s still something that scares me to this day,” Riley told the Halifax Examiner in an interview. “I needed to do something. I showed [my sons] I’m not just going to stand by and go ‘Oh well, that happens.’”
Those shoreline cleanups soon became her daily routine and she goes out regardless of the weather. So far this year, Riley’s picked up more than 5,000 pounds of trash from shorelines. Her two young sons inspired her to get started.
Riley started an environmental business called Scotian Shores. The company organizes shoreline cleanups, most of which are in the Southwestern part of the province and along the Bay of Fundy. So far this year, it’s hosted more than 835 cleanups, mostly in Halifax, the Bay of Fundy, and Southwest Nova Scotia. And the volume of debris collected is staggering: more than 140,000 pounds, or 63.5 tonnes, by the end of June.
A portion of what Scotian Shores cleans up is ghost gear: lost or abandoned fishing gear like rope, lobster traps, and other plastics used in the seafood processing industry. For those cleanups, Scotian Shores applied for funding through the Ghost Gear Fund at Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO).
Since 2020, DFO has been funding organizations that work on retrieving, recycling, and disposing ghost gear. There’s also funding for organizations that create technology aimed at prevention, reduction, and retrieval of ghost gear. And still more funding goes to promote international projects or to small island states to create their own sustainable fisheries practices and programs to deal with the impact of ghost gear.
The latest round of funding for 2023 to 2024 will go to organizations that will clean up ghost gear lost because of Hurricane Fiona.
‘Soul destroying’ work
While Riley does cleanups in the Halifax area, there’s not so much ghost gear on the city’s shorelines. She finds most of the ghost gear on beaches along the Bay of Fundy. She said about 80% of the garbage on those beaches is ghost gear. That’s rope; lobster traps; and lobster bands, the elastics put around the lobster claws by workers at processing plants.
“We find the majority of garbage washing ashore is down that way and I blame it on the tides,” Riley said.
“We know where things gather at this point. In the wintertime, I know, for a fact, I can go clean the same beach in Kings every eight hours and walk away with 200 pounds, probably.”
She said not all of the ghost gear is local. Some of it’s coming to the Bay of Fundy from the U.S. Eastern seaboard. Still, some of that ghost gear has been on those shorelines a long time.
“When we’re on the Digby Neck we’re cleaning up what I call legacy pollution,” Riley said. “That’s stuff that’s been there, left there, for 30, 40 years.”
Riley said the work is both rewarding and discouraging.
“It’s a mixture between, ‘Woo hoo, we cleaned this all up’ but then also super soul destroying. That’s the term I use. Soul destroying,” Riley said. “What do you do? But it’s super rewarding to see the amount of people who have gathered with us to clean with us and the different government organizations, fishermen, unions… that are reaching out to say, ‘Hey, we’d like to fund this because you’re doing a really good job.’”
Dalhousie researchers removing tonnes of gear
A team of researchers from Dalhousie University also used money from the Ghost Gear Fund to retrieve ghost gear (or what they call abandoned, lost and discarded fishing gear) in three lobster fishing areas — 33, 34, and 35 — in Southwestern Nova Scotia.
Tony Walker is an associate professor at the School of Resource and Environmental Studies at Dalhousie. Walker, students from Dalhousie, Coastal Action, and a group of volunteers, fishers, and other groups worked to retrieve that gear.
During the two-year study from 2019 to 2021, the teams did 997 tows in the three areas. Using boats that towed hooked grapples, they covered 4,000 square kilometres of ocean and found 25 tonnes of gear on the sea floor. They collected another five tonnes along the coastline during shoreline cleanups. The fishing gear they found included lobster traps, ropes, hooks, and cables. Other debris they found included party balloons, buckets, an engine block, and aquaculture netting and weights.
“So, collectively it was a total of 30 [tonnes], which is staggering. This is just the tip of the iceberg. If we did this every year, you’d find similar amounts,” Walker said in an interview.
Walker said ghost gear can be dangerous for sea life beyond the whales becoming entangled in ropes and nets. In their study, the lobster traps they found contained more than 650 lobsters and almost 60 kinds of fish. Those included species at risk like Atlantic wolffish, Atlantic cod, and white hake. The teams released most of those fish back into the ocean.
‘“There have been others that have argued that a [lobster] trap with a door falling off is effectively creating an artificial reef, which is true, but the traps themselves are not as benign as you think they are,” Walker said. “They’re often covered in PVC-coated wire mesh and that PVC, over time with weathering and age and also physical abrasion with rocks or lobster claws, will actually leak microplastics. And PVC is one of the many plastic polymers that are known to be highly toxic in marine environments.”
Lobster traps, even when they’re lost or abandoned, continue to catch unsuspecting lobster, crabs, and fin fish.
“And it’s a perpetual baiting cycle. [The traps] actually become very appealing to other scavengers and they in turn get in, get trapped, and they can’t get out,” Walker said.
As for how much ghost gear is in the ocean, Walker said any estimates should be taken with “a pinch of salt.” He said ghost gear like lobster pots are far heavier by weight than other trash like plastic bags that might be in the ocean. But Walker said about 570,000 traps are set just in lobster fishing area 34. According to DFO estimates, based on reporting from fishers, the annual loss rate of gear is about 1% to 2%.
“If you start to extrapolate all the lobster fishing areas around Nova Scotia, notwithstanding that LFA 34 is the biggest and most lucrative, we’re in the millions of traps around the province. Even one to two percent loss rate of millions of traps starts to add up,” Walker said.
“Obviously, you get a weather event like Hurricane Fiona last year that wreaked havoc on the industry because it just picked these traps up and moved them to heaven knows where.”
Still, Walker said the ghost gear they were able to retrieve in the two-year study moves “the dial in the right direction.”
“We can’t leave that stuff on the ocean floor or on the coastline, causing harm to wildlife, including species at risk,” Walker said. “But we also need to highlight the problem so people are aware and make sure governments continue to fund this because it’s an industry which they regulate, but it’s also an industry they can also assist and help to become more sustainable in the future.”
Walker was one of several authors on a report published last week that looked at how side scan sonar can be used to better to detect and retrieve ghost gear.
Global Ghost Gear Initiative
Joel Baziuk is the associate director with the Global Ghost Gear Initiative (GGGI), an organization whose origins were in the World Animal Protection International in the U.K. That group started looking at the ghost gear issue from the animal entanglement perspective — think the endangered right whales being caught in nets and rope.
“As they started to dig into it, they realized this is about much more than just animal entanglement,” said Baziuk in an interview. “That’s a piece of it, but it also has to do with the health and livelihoods of coastal economies and fishers and global food security, and it links to climate change, as you start seeing more rough weather happen and in terms of gear loss.”
GGGI is the umbrella organization for other groups around the world that are working on concerns about ghost gear. GGGI focuses on building evidence around ghost gear, creating best practices and policies for retrieval and disposal, and finding solutions.
“The idea behind the Global Ghost Gear Initiative was to say, ‘OK, what if we put all those organizations under one umbrella and really start to drive change around the world?'” Baziuk said. “Learning lessons, sharing information, what can be done, what can’t be done, and build this network of global expertise, and use that to drive policy change, build evidence, and really try to come up with last solutions.”
Baziuk defines ghost gear as any fishing gear not under human control. That gear gets lost when rough storms scatter the gear or it’s caught on something under the water. The reasons for loss vary by region. A fishing area with a rocky floor might have more ghost gear than a sandy region.
The goal is education, retrieval, disposal, and prevention, and Baziuk said Canada is one of the global leaders on addressing the issue.
“When it comes to prevention, it’s now mandatory in Canada to report gear when it’s lost. It’s a condition of licence over the last few years. They track that data and use it to inform where removal efforts should be done in the off season in subsequent years.”
That data is also submitted to the GGGI global data portal; Canada is the first government to submit such data.
But ghost gear is a byproduct of the fishing industry:
Anywhere there is fishing, there’s going to be some degree of gear loss. I stress that no fisher wants to lose their gear. It’s expensive, it’s the means by which they harvest seafood to feed their families, to feed the world. There are three and a half billion people who rely on seafood as a source of protein. So, fishing is not going anywhere. It’s not a fair-weather industry. You fish when the fish are there. If you’ve seen Deadliest Catch or something like that, aside from the story, which it is entertainment, the conditions in certain fisheries. That’s real. It’s not everywhere, but that’s what people experience when they’re out fishing. So, rough weather is a cause of gear loss. There’s a lot of vessel traffic out on the ocean. That can be a main cause of gear loss. It’s an issue no matter where you are and no matter how well managed the fishery is because of circumstances outside the fishers’ control, gear loss will happen.
Fishers want to be part of the solution
Ruth Inniss is a fisheries advisor with the Maritime Fishermen’s Union (MFU). The union has been organizing ghost gear cleanups the last few years, including projects in lobster fishing areas 26 and 27 that were funded by DFO’s Ghost Gear Fund.
Inniss said the industry takes the issue of ghost gear seriously.
“Not only does that create more debris in the ocean and so on, it’s also getting costly because traps aren’t free. The gear is not free. It’s an added cost and an added financial burden,” Inniss said in an interview.
And she noted that gear is lost for many reasons. For example, she said there were old herring nets in one area that had been in the water for 30 years. Those have been cleaned up.
“A number of years ago in Cape Breton, we got a real trap-smashing storm and people were losing gear all over the place because of the storm. There are a number of reasons that there’s ghost gear on the bottom. The initiative to try to get it up is really positive,” Inniss said.
One product that is making its way to the fishing industry to prevent entanglement with sea life is ropeless gear. That gear is set on the bottom of the seafloor with no buoy attached on the surface. When the fisher wants to collect the gear, they send a signal via a device such as a smartphone and the gear floats to the surface. Having the gear on the seafloor prevents entanglement.
Gordon Beaton is a lobster fisherman who works off Ballantyne’s Cove in Antigonish County. He said ropeless gear could be an option, but told the Examiner the technology still needs work. Getting it right is “years away.”
“The biggest single factor that’s making it very difficult to implement beyond the cost of all this stuff. Although this cost may settle down if there was volume, there’s no way to see the ropeless gear underwater unlike current gear, which floats on the surface,” Beaton said.
“Until we have the technology that can tell me somehow where the gear is found… it doesn’t have to tell me whose it is or whatever, but that it’s there, so I don’t set on top of it because that becomes the issue.”
Beaton added that same technology could also be used to find lost and abandoned gear. That tech, Beaton said, could be beneficial for DFO, which also needs to know where traps are set.
“There is a lot of stuff left to do before it’s actually operational,” Beaton said.
Beaton said he knows about groups that do shoreline cleanups and find ghost gear, including traps and rope. He said he wants people to know that fishers are working on cleanups, too.
“It’s not like finding a refrigerator or a washing machine on the beach. There’s no value for us in losing gear,” he said. “It is a loss and we do as much as we can not to have that happen, obviously … It’s generally when something goes wrong or it breaks that it ends up there. But we also would like to, when possible, get that stuff out of the water, if we can.”
It’s often the fishers in the industry who get the blame for ghost gear. Baziuk said photos of seals or right whales entangled in fishing ropes and other gear get a lot of public attention.
But he said the fishers are the ones who are being part of the solution. No fisher, he said, wants to lose their gear. It’s expensive to buy and expensive to replace. Baziuk said more education on ghost gear is needed, and not just about the issue of animal entanglement. Those images do get people stirred up. But it also means people don’t completely understand the issue of ghost gear, saying “the reality is much more complicated.”
Riley sees that with her work at Scotian Shores. She said some people assume fishers are simply tossing their gear overboard.
“I’m sure back 30, 40 years ago, that was the case,” Riley said. “Things are changing. We have a lot of fishermen that come and help us. We need more, always. I’d like to emphasize they’re out there helping. It’s been really uplifting to see how many fishers come out and say, ‘No, we need to do better. This is our livelihood, this is our life.’”
Walker said working with local fishers was the “cornerstone” of the Dalhousie and Coastal Action project. He said the work couldn’t have been done without that collaboration.
Walker said there are policies that could be changed to help fishers be a bigger part of the solution. Currently under DFO policies, any lobster fisher who has lobster traps belonging to another fisher on their boat faces fines. He suggests that could be changed so fishers, who are the ones with the local knowledge of where ghost gear is located, can pick up lost or abandoned lobster traps when they see them.
“So, at the moment, even if fishers do stumble upon other fishers’ traps, which happens because they have the techniques, they have those grapples… there’s no incentive for them to do that. In fact, there’s a disincentive for them to do that,” Walker said.
What can the rest of us do?
Signing up for a shoreline cleanup is one way to help clean up ghost gear. Scotian Shores posts cleanups on its Facebook page and they’re often looking for volunteers to join a cleanup team.
Baziuk said consumers of seafood can also educate themselves on the issue, too. He said there are resources on the GGGI website to help.
Again, it’s not about burning the industry to the ground, but it’s about understanding this as a challenge. Fishers, they’re starting to understand now what the impacts of gear loss is on the species that they’re harvesting, on the environment on which those species rely, and they’re being part of the solution. Over the last few years, we’ve really turned a corner from the industry, but also from around the world about what a challenge this is. As a consumer, I’d say be aware of where your seafood comes from, if it can be certified by any number of certification companies, that certainly helps. There’s no guarantee there will be no gear loss; there will always be some amount of gear loss.
Riley is also working to get seafood processing plants to reduce the number of lobster bands that end up in the water.
She’s done presentations on the lobster bands and would like to see Nova Scotia follow the lead of New Brunswick. Seafood processing plants there must have mesh on pipes to prevent those bands from getting into the water in the first place. She’s even visited processing plants with handfuls of those bands. She said she suspects there are “millions” on shorelines and in oceans.
“People are like ‘you’re exaggerating’ and I’m like come to the beach and see for yourself. In the wintertime, not right now,” Riley said.
‘I’m pretty excited for this year’
Riley said she’s more optimistic than ever about what Scotian Shores can accomplish in cleaning up Nova Scotia’s shorelines.
“When I started this I was like, ‘We’re by ourselves, no one cares.’ And trying to just get the attention like, ‘Look how bad the shorelines are,'” she said. “Now it feels like things are changing. A lot of people are getting involved. More groups are coming over to help with the cleanups. I’m pretty excited for this year.”
Riley learned in June that the company received another round of funding from the federal Ghost Gear Fund.
That money will help pay for cleanups, including on Cape Island. It will also help to hire a helicopter and pilot to pick up sacks of debris in areas not accessible by boat.
The company recently took a tour of Sustane Technologies facility in Chester. Riley said it will take ghost gear and turn it into naphtha, which is used as a chemical feedstock, and synthetic light fuel oil.
“Three years ago, I could not say that. It would maybe be 1% [that was recycled]. It was embarrassing. Everything was going in the landfill, but not anymore,” she said.
Riley said some lobster traps can be recycled. Crafters use some of the wood from the wooden lobster traps. Some of the fishing ropes Scotian Shores find get recycled, too. They can be made into crafts, like flowers, wreathes, and pictures frames, which they sell on their website. Lobster bands they collect get recycled by a company in New Brunswick. Scotian Shores is working with DS Plastics in Southwest Nova Scotia to recycle plastic bottle caps and other plastic containers.
Walker said the ghost gear collected by the team at Dalhousie University and Coastal Action was either disposed of properly or recycled. Ropes that weren’t snarled in knots were washed and recycled. Some lobster traps that were still intact were repurposed with little effort.
“Most fishers would welcome that because it the traps were returned to their original owners, then that saves them money. Even if we were able to repurpose them and other fishers used them, then that’s also reuse, which is great.”
What a nightmare.