Through the Ocean Recovery Project, environmental charity Keep Britain Tidy has been on an incredible journey to address the devastation of ghost gear. A big part of the issue around ghost gear, and much of the ocean-found and ocean-bound plastic in the UK, is the inability to effectively recycle it.
1,100 volunteer participants have recovered more than 180 tonnes of waste from our oceans since 2016 – that’s the weight of six humpback whales! And they’re not stopping there.
The Keep Britain Tidy Ocean Recovery Project is giving hard-to-recycle marine plastic an incredible second life, with recovered materials having been used for everything from sound boards at Glastonbury to mile markers at the London Marathon… and even a humble school bench!
The Ocean Recovery Project meticulously sorts hundreds of metres of rope and netting by hand before transporting them to a UK recycling plant. There they’re shredded, washed and dried before being transformed into plastic pellets, ready to be reborn as something new – a stylish candle holder, a sturdy bench or even a vibrant plant pot.
Discarded ghost gear, a term given to abandoned or lost fishing gear such as fishing nets, long lines, fish traps and lobster pots, causes vast amounts of damage to our ocean’s delicate ecosystem. According to the World Economic Forum, more than 100,000 whales, dolphins, seals and turtles get caught in ghost gear each year. As well as this devastating statistic, the huge nets, some as big as a football pitch, can take up to 600 years to break down while shedding microplastics into the marine environment, compromising ecosystems, killing marine life and causing habitat damage.
Plastics that wash up on our beaches also pose a risk to wildlife and coastal ecosystems and whilst volunteer and community-led litter picks can help to reduce litter on those coastlines, there is no viable means of recycling it.
Since 2016, the Ocean Recovery Project has worked hard to help develop ways for beach cleaners in our communities to recycle the litter they find. In collaboration with plastic recycling specialists, it has turned plastic bottles into park benches and huge fishing nets into plastic pellets that can then be turned into any number of other useful items.
The FatFace Foundation has proudly donated £40,000 to the Ocean Recovery Project towards the establishment of a new national collection and recycling system for abandoned ghost gear in the UK.
