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Comment by dakr | Hacker News Reader

Not to minimize the impact to ocean life and the environment, but lost fishing gear costs money. The upside of which is that there is direct financial incentive to recover lost gear. I know nothing about this space, but a former coworker started a company about ten years ago in part to allow fishers to track and recover their gear: https://www.blueoceangear.com/

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One report I read was that much of it was discarded as it got too damaged to use. So hardly an accidental loss.

I would say the bigger incentive is not to lose the gear in the first place, but even that doesn't seem to be enough.

In some kinds of fishing, it seems they deploy nets and then collect them later, so this would help them not lose it in the first place. Also, location information is always good to have and is useful for more than just finding lost stuff.

It depend a lot on the kind of fishing operation. At small scale the fishing gear is a large part of the investment. This is why repairing nets is a large part of those peoples time. Tracking is a nice technological solution, through at small scale the money is tight and local knowledge usually mean that they know where the net is by memory/intuition and keeping track of where the winds/currents are going.

Large scale fishing fleet however do not generally repair fishing nets, especially trawlers. It not economical to spent time and manpower for it, and since they are out at sea for weeks/months there isn't any space. The law require them to dispose broken nets at landfills but that is a cost center. As such it is suspected is that they just intentionally throw the nets over board.

> The law require them to dispose broken nets at landfills but that is a cost center.

You could fix that by moving the cost. Make nets really expensive to purchase, and instead give a deposit back at the landfill. This way, there would be a profit in properly disposing of nets.

Of course, it might not be practical to suddenly have to watch for contraband smuggled nets at the borders.

The nets wear out. There is no incentive to recover here. Most of these nets are dumped when they develop too many holes to be useful. It's easier than bringing the shredded net back to shore and trying to dispose of it.

Chinese shipping fleets do this routinely.

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