Baltic TACs agreed for 2024
Quotas agreed for next year’s Baltic fisheries are a mixture of rollovers and reductions – with a 7% increase in Gulf of Finland salmon the only one of the list…
Commissioner calls together Baltic summit
The European Commission is calling together a second Our Baltic Conference, to be held in Palanga in September, bringing together ministers from the eight EU nations that border the Baltic…
Subsidies for collecting ghost gear
The Swedish authorities are supporting efforts to map and retrieve lost fishing gear with an initiative open to state bodies, regions, municipalities, universities, universities, scientific institutes, trade associations, POs, associations…
Ørsted establishes long-term action plan to tackle UK marine litter
Ørsted has made a long-term commitment to help tackle the amount of marine litter in our seas. Working closely with the fishing industry, Ørsted has established a Fishing for Litter…
Cleaning up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch
Norwegian fishing gear supplier Mørenot is playing a key role in the initiative to remove plastic from the marine environment spearheaded by Dutch NGO The Ocean Cleanup. A prototype set…
A QR-coded gear tag in GGGI’s ongoing project in Indonesia
IMO to develop mandatory gear marking
The Marine Environmental Protection Committee (MEPC) of the International Maritime Organisation (IMO) has announced that a mandatory goal-based requirement for the marking of fishing gear will be developed. This is…
APASA vessels retrieved 452kg of plastic marine waste from June to September last year
World’s first plastic neutral fishery
As part of an annual ghost gear removal competition project in 2021, the Azores fleet has removed more plastic fishing gear from the ocean, by weight, than it lost on…
Every metre of hauled new rope releases around 20 microplastic fragments into the ocean, and for older rope that figure rises to as much as 760 fragments per metre
Maritime rope could be adding billions of microplastics to oceans
The hauling of rope on fishing and other vessels could result in billions of microplastic fragments entering the ocean every year, according to new research. A study by the University…
In a single day volunteers collected close to two tonnes of mainly plastic waste from the beach at Krossavík. Image: Hampiðjan
Insights from Hampiðjan’s annual beach clean-up
Every year staff from fishing gear manufacturer Hampiðjan and their families join in a beach clean-up session, and this year’s effort highlighted some of the changes in the way fishing…
Fish in a beach seine for microplastic analysis. Image: Maiju Lehtiniemi SYKE
Microplastics found in all water systems
According to research by Finnish Environment Institute SYKE and University of Eastern Finland, microplastics are now found in all Baltic waters and in fish, bivalve molluscs and benthic fauna. Microplastics…