Saving Seafood

Net Your Problem is making the fishing industry greener one net at a time

May 30, 2023 — I had the pleasure of speaking with Nicole Baker, founder of Net Your Problem, a company that recycles end-of-life fishing gear. As a former North Pacific groundfish fisheries observer from 2010 to 2015, Nicole has felt tied to the commercial fishing industry and found herself looking for ways to make the industry greener. During her time as an observer in Dutch Harbor, she became interested in ways of recycling the many worn out fishing nets she came across.

She was first inspired by a nonprofit organization that had collected nets from and illegal fishing operation. Shortly after, that nonprofit began a concept of making shoes with the material. At the time, Nicole had a realization that this netting was made from plastics, and at the end of all net’s lives, landfills were the final destination. She knew where there were just heaps of netting that were no longer useable by fishermen.

This was when the concept for Net Your Problem came to life.

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

1 million pounds and counting: Recycling fishing nets and lines takes off in Alaska coastal communities

December 1, 2021 — Over 1 million pounds of old fishing nets and lines from Alaska have made it so far to recycling markets where they are remade into plastic pellets and fibers.

The milestone was reached with a recent haul of nets from Dutch Harbor and more are already adding to the total. Shipping vans filled with old gear collected at Haines were offloaded in Seattle last week and another container from Cordova is on its way.

Dutch Harbor was the first to sign on four years ago with Net Your Problem, a small Seattle-based company that jumpstarted fishing gear recycling in Alaska and facilitates its collection and transport, primarily to Europe. The Net Your Problem team has partnered with the city and the region’s Qawalangin tribe to sort through piles of old nets and lines dumped at the landfill and undertake continuing outreach to boat owners to encourage them to recycle their gear.

Similar partnerships have formed in other Alaska coastal communities to start or sustain a recycling effort.

At Cordova, the Copper River Watershed Project collected and prepped roughly 16,000 pounds of gillnets for recycling so far, said Net Your Problem founder Nicole Baker-Loke, a former Alaska fisheries observer and current research associate at Washington State University.

Read the full story at the Anchorage Daily News

ALASKA: Net recycling effort spreads to Southeast; almanac seeks stories

April 18, 2019 — The Panhandle plans to be the next Alaska region to give new life to old fishing gear by sending it to plastic recycling centers. The tons of nets and lines piled up in local lots and landfills will become the raw material for soda bottles, cell phone cases, sunglasses, skateboards, swimsuits and more.

Juneau, Haines, Petersburg and possibly Sitka have partnered with Net Your Problem to launch an effort this year to send old or derelict seine and gillnets to a recycler in Richmond, British Columbia.

“We’re going to be working in a new location with a new material and sending it to a new recycler,” said Nicole Baker, founder of Net Your Problem and the force behind fishing gear recycling in Alaska.

Baker, a former fisheries observer who also is a research assistant for Ray Hilborn at the University of Washington, jumpstarted recycling programs for trawl nets, crab and halibut line two years ago at Dutch Harbor and Kodiak quickly followed. The nets can weigh from 5,000 to 25,000 tons and can cost $350 to $500 per ton for disposal in landfills. The community/industry collaborations in both towns have so far sent 300,000 pounds of gear in seven vans to Europe for recycling.

“Each fishing port will have its own special logistics plan but the general role is the same,” she said. “You need somebody to give you the nets, truck them around, load them and ship them.”

Read the full story at the Alaska Journal of Commerce