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November 13, 2025
In Hawaiʻi, the vast majority of marine debris is plastic—and the vast majority of that plastic marine debris is derelict fishing gear. Derelict fishing gear (DFG), also known as “ghost gear,” refers to any abandoned, lost, or discarded fishing equipment in the marine environment. Fishing gear can become derelict because of severe weather, entanglements with vessels or the sea bottom, breakage from old age, or inappropriate disposal at sea.
Globally, between 500,000 to one million tons of fishing gear waste enters the ocean every year. Once in the ocean, the gear can stay there for centuries-–entangling and killing marine animals, damaging coral reefs, fragmenting into microplastics that contaminate the marine food web, creating navigational hazards for boats, and costing global economies billions of dollars in damage. These consequences will worsen as DFG pollution increases with the rising scale of global fishing operations compounded by the use of highly durable gear made from synthetic materials.
While DFG pollutes all the oceans around the world, Hawaiʻi is a hotbed for it. The close proximity of the Great (or North) Pacific Garbage Patch within the North Pacific Gyre directs a disproportionate amount of debris from wider parts of the Pacific Ocean to the archipelago. Furthermore, the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, which are part of the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument, act as a giant sieve, trapping 115,000 pounds of DFG throughout its shorelines annually. This ghost gear threatens Hawaiʻi 's marine ecosystem, economy, and culture but action can be taken to reduce fishing waste and remove existing waste.
Gear that floats, such as drifting fish-aggregating devices (dFADs) and trawl fishing nets, can drift from anywhere in the Pacific to Hawaiʻi. In an analysis of the structure and chemical composition of DFG in Hawaiʻi’s waters, Hawaii Pacific University's Center for Marine Debris Research (CMDR) found that the majority of the DFG in Hawaiʻi is foreign gear, primarily from China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan.
Dr. Jennifer Lynch, an environmental chemist and the co-director of CMDR, told EESI that the center is hoping to begin conversations to address DFG with those countries’ governments, fishing organizations, and gear manufacturers. CMDR has already met with a Chinese delegation of eight conservation professionals and was hosted by the Korea Sea Grant Program and Taiwan's Ocean Conservation Administration. The team is also attend the North Pacific Marine Science Organization’s annual meeting in Japan in November 2025.
“As a trans-boundary issue, it's an uncomfortable conversation to have pointing fingers and blame,” said Lynch. “The way we're approaching it is we want to collaboratively work with the organizations in those Asian countries to tackle this problem.”
Along with identifying DFG’s sources, CMDR is also looking at pollution prevention. “We don't just want to keep studying it and removing it forever and ever. What's in the [North Pacific] Garbage Patch today will take us 500 years to remove, so we really need to turn off the tap,” explained Lynch.
On the manufacturing side, CMDR recommends more gear markings to identify which region gear comes from. Gear markings can also facilitate real-time positioning information to support gear retrieval and remote sensing analysis. While the United States requires gear markings for some equipment like gillnets and longlines—and several states also have their own regulations—the country has no comprehensive law or regulation applicable to all fishing gear. Lynch specified that these markings should continuously run throughout the gear itself, as opposed to being on a tag that can get lost.
Fisherman-to-Fisherman Workshops
One way to share best practices to avoid abandoning gear is through fisherman-to-fisherman workshops. CMDR reports that some fisheries have advice on how to properly secure fishing gear to prevent it from being lost, especially during hurricanes and storms. One study reports that workshops can help engage stakeholders, improve management decisions, and increase acceptability of practices that address DFG. Another study which interviewed fishermen, fisher cooperatives, fishery managers, researchers, and NGOs found consensus across these DFG stakeholder groups that educational activities to promote best practices are helpful to reduce DFG.
Gear manufacturers can also shift away from plastic-–which never fully decomposes—to more biodegradable materials. Fishing gear is typically made from plastics like nylon (or other polyamides), polyester (or other polyethylenes), and polypropylene, and has a service life of 18 to 24 months. While biodegradable alternatives can have a shorter lifespan than typical gear and still have some potential to become DFG, they disappear much more rapidly from the environment. Biodegradable co-polyester materials, for example, degrade almost completely through contact with water (hydrolysis) after 10 to 50 years, compared to over one thousand years for polyamide gear. However, biodegradable gear can have lower mechanical strength and durability than conventional gear, which can discourage its adoption by commercial fishing operations. To counter this, one study proposes offering fishermen financial incentives to offset the reduced efficiency of biodegradable gear.
With the majority of Hawaiʻi’s DFG coming from other countries, there is a need for prevention strategies on an international scale. The United States can coordinate with other countries to stop DFG at the source, as well as place the onus of mitigation funding on producing countries. This will help the islands repair their coral reefs and protect marine biodiversity, both of which hold significant ecological and cultural value.
“The Hawaiian culture cultivates responsibility and stewarding our environmental resources,” said Lynch. “This is an external threat that is happening to Hawaiʻi. So it's not our fault that it's happening, but we have to steward what's happening to us and look externally to try to prevent and stop it.”
Although prevention is important, Hawaiʻi must reckon with the hundreds of thousands of pounds of DFG currently likely to be present in its waters. CMDR’s bounty project aims to reduce DFG by rewarding commercial fishers who collect DFG they find out at sea. They are paid $1-$3 per dry pound of DFG brought back to port. Since 2022, the project has removed over 174,534 of DFG from Hawaiʻi’s waters and shoreline. CMDR sorts, studies, and recycles the recovered DFG. This project’s success can be amplified with more buyback programs to ensure effective removal of DFG from the sea.
In Hawaii, there are currently only two large-scale disposal options for DFG: landfilling, or incineration. However, landfill siting is a challenge in Hawaiʻi due to geographic limitations and zoning restrictions. Rather than expanding landfills, CMDR is advocating for mechanical recycling (in which plastic is grinded and re-granulated to be reused in new products) as a more viable solution for dealing with recovered DFG on the islands.
Mechanical recycling is the most sustainable option for DFG disposal (when compared to landfilling or incineration) because it embeds carbon and reduces the consumption of fossil fuels and metals. DFG must be sorted according to its chemical composition before it can be mechanically recycled. CMDR has the only functioning marine debris recycling conversion facility in Hawaiʻi. However, the center, which includes the bounty project and recycling facility, faces significant funding challenges. About 98% of the research center’s funding is federal—from NIST, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the Department of Transportation. Much of that funding is set to lapse in September 2026.
“We don't have the space to store all [the recovered DFG], and so we are searching for somewhere between two and 20 million dollars to maintain the [recycling] facility and have it long term,” Lynch explained. “Otherwise, it just closes, and all this great investment by Sea Grant and the NOAA Marine Debris Program just ends.”
If it receives more investment upfront, CMDR has a plan to sustain funding: producing and selling products from the recycled DFG. However, Lynch believes the revenue from these products would not fully cover the marine debris removal costs, which would need to be covered by local/state government or, alternatively, the polluting entities.
“It doesn't make sense to keep importing products onto the island if we can convert this raw material that we receive on a daily basis into locally necessary infrastructure products,” explained Mafalda de Freitas, a marine biologist and CMDR’s Megaplastics Program Director. “We can embed that carbon into these products instead of having to burn it, so that will also help with greenhouse gas emissions by not having to ship materials and creating a more sustainable circular economy and workforce.”
CMDR proposes rethinking the status quo of marine debris responsibility. While supported by government funding, the cleanup and prevention of marine debris is largely left to nonprofit and volunteer groups. At the current pace, it will take over 500 years to clean up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, according to Lynch. Commercial-scale salvage and removal of marine debris is necessary but expensive, making federal government support and intervention critical.
“We are highly dependent on these small grassroot efforts, NGOs, who do fantastic work, but definitely need a lot more support to be able to do this efficiently,” said de Freitas.
Author: Laura Gries
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