Derelict fishing gear has always been a headache for the authority as it can entangle whales and sea turtles, litter the beaches, foul boats’ propellers, and keep doing exactly what it was made to do, catch fish, long after it is lost at sea. But now a new partnership comes up with an idea of safe disposal of derelict gear by generate electricity. The derelicts gear are often referred as ghost gear and are an unseen problem in part because fishermen have no incentive to recover and dispose of them.
Now fishermen from around the Mid Cape can come to the Chatham transfer station and dispose of ghost gear for free. They said that the waste will be trucked to a trash-to-energy plant in Haverhill, Mass., where it will be burned to generate electricity. According to the federal officials it’s hard to determine how much ghost gear is out there, but since the “Fishing for Energy” programme was launched in Gloucester in February, more than 83,000 pounds of nets, trawl gear, crab pots and line have been collected.
It is told that Chatham is the fifth port to take part in the programme, which is co-sponsored by Covanta Energy, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and Schnitzer Steel. Experts said that though it would be preferable for fishing gear to be recycled into other products, it is too contaminated with debris, and marine life and other materials to be easily be processed that way.
Megan Forbes of NOAA’s Marine Debris Programme, informed that ghost gear is a “humongous problem,” not only because it can choke marine mammals, needlessly deplete fish stocks and destroy active fishing gear, but because it is hard to dispose of.
