(Information Source: Undercurrent News, on Wed May 20, 2020, 10:16 BST)

The Environmental Justice Foundation (EJF) has announced that it will be running a project to rid Thailand's waters of discarded fishing nets, reprocessing them for use in the manufacture of goods such as sports and kitchen equipment.

Funded by the Norwegian Retailers' Environment Fund, the Net Free Seas project will train coastal communities in the collection of discarded fishing equipment -- so-called 'ghost gear' -- which can entangle and kill all manner of marine wildlife. Similarly, the project will train local fisherman in how to avoid losing equipment while at sea.

All collected gear will be cleaned with salt water, compressed into blocks, and then transported to a local recycling partner. There, the blocks are re-processed into pellets and distributed for use at various end-user manufacturing companies.

Already, EJF has lined up two companies to make use of the recycled material -- Thai design brand Quality and watersports equipment manufacturer Starboard.

With funding in place for another year, EJF hopes to get 10 local communities on board, it said, building off a successful pilot project which saw three fishing villages collect over one metric ton of fishing nets during the course of a year.

EJF hopes the Net Free Seas project will have recycled more than 5 metric tons of ghost gear by the end of the project's first year, which commences Aug. 1.

"The damage that ghost nets inflict every year is vast, as these nets continue to catch and kill marine wildlife," said EJF executive director Steve Trent. "This project will empower coastal communities to clean their own seas of these floating death traps. This will provide crucial protection to ocean wildlife while at the same time giving much-needed economic support to local fishing communities."

"Fishing gear is made of plastic, killing fish and other marine lives for decades before eventually being degraded into microplastic," added Rasmus Hansson, CEO of the Norwegian Retailers' Environment Fund. "It is highly important that lost nets, pots and other fishing gear are cleaned up from our ocean, and we have high confidence that EJF will contribute significantly to do exactly that."