Photos: Nicole Baker/Net Your Problem.
As the 2024 commercial salmon fishery began to wind down and worn out, discarded fishing nets piled up, fishing industry veteran Nicole Baker moved quickly to recycle those nets into new products and keep tons of them out of landfills.
In advance of the 2024 fishing season Baker traveled to Haines, Juneau, Cordova, Valdez, Homer, Kenai, Naknek, Egegik and Dillingham to speak with fishermen and others in those communities about how to clean those discarded nets so they are ready to bale up and ship to recycling firms in British Columbia, Tennessee or Southern California to make new products from recycled plastic.
Nets collected from fishermen on the East Coast go to European recyclers, she said.
Baker, a former fisheries observer and fisheries researcher at the University of Washington, is the founder of Net Your Problem, which offers fishing gear recycling services to the fishing industry.
Her goal? To create an economically viable pathway to recycle end of life fishing gear, improve waste management, contribute to the circular economy and reduce energy use and greenhouse gas emissions related to virgin plastic.
“Nets that are not recycled on land go to the landfill, which is a shame because that is just wasting valuable petroleum resources,” Baker explained in a film produced by Grundens, a major maker of apparel for the commercial fishing industry.
“That is sort of my motivation for Net Your Problem and how I live my personal life, which is to make the most minimal footprint that you can have on the Earth,” Baker said. “When I come back to a place to recycle I know people. I ask about their kids. I bring them their favorite beer. That’s what you would do with a friend. We have a bond and we are working toward the same thing.”
Baker recalled her “light bulb moment” back in 2015 when she found a story about how Adidas was making a prototype sneaker out of confiscated fishing gear from the ocean.
She got herself a job as a commercial fisheries observer and in the course of her job she saw places at Unalaska where “there were just mountains of discarded fishing nets all over the place.”
For commercial fishermen in Alaska and elsewhere, their boat is a small business.
“All these businesses need to look at their operations and look at ways to reduce resource use and consumption,” she said.
The worn-out nets need to be stripped. The cork line needs to be removed. The lifeline needs to be removed and the twine needs to be removed. Then the nets can be dropped off at a collection spot for Net Your Problem, ready to be baled up and sent to recycling companies.
One example of how these nets are recycled is with companies like Aquafil and Grundens.
Aquafil takes discarded fishing nets, as well as old carpets and other waste, and turns them into nylon and a yarn called Econyl. If used as is, without mixing in other fibers, Econyl can be infinitely recycled, forever remade into new clothes.
Grundens uses Econyl to make products like leggings, shorts and pants. This clothing is sold back into the apparel fishing industry to ensure that the nylon waste headed for the landfill is put to a better use, Baker said.
“I think I focus on nets because I have a connection with that industry and it wasn’t being done,” Baker added.
In Bristol Bay alone, estimates are that 150,000 pounds of nets are thrown away every year after the six weeks of intense harvesting.
“At the end of those six weeks fishermen strip their nets and get rid of them because they have holes in them or they are worn out,” she said.
In doing her initial research, Baker said she learned that there was a factory that accepted worn-out nets and ropes, and she thought she could get take all that used fishing gear from point A to point B.
“I had no idea how frigging complicated this whole thing out be,” she said.
But Baker figured it out and these days Net Your Problem is recycling worn out commercial fishing gear on both the West Coast and East Coast.
The list of materials her company works to recycling range from midwater trawl, codend, bottom trawl net, seine web and purse line to soft buoys gillnet web, weedline, sink line and lead and cork line from gillnets.
The range of products produced from these used plastics otherwise destined for landfills range from sunglasses and shopping bags to bicycle seats, shopping bags and clothing for commercial fish harvesters.