Fishers as guardians: the one kind of marine plastic that has an owner

• November 9, 2026

Most marine litter arrives anonymously. Lost fishing gear does not. It is manufactured for a known industry, deployed by identifiable fleets from identifiable ports, and lost in circumstances that the people who lost it can describe in detail. That is the premise behind the PHAROS Fisher Guardians Programme: if one waste stream in the ocean can be traced back to the people best placed to prevent it, the intervention should start with them rather than with the beach.

Why is abandoned gear treated as a separate problem

Abandoned, lost or discarded fishing gear, ALDFG in the literature, behaves differently from other plastics. A net on the seabed continues to do the job it was designed for, catching marine life with no one to haul it in. This is usually called ghost fishing, and it makes gear loss a biodiversity question as well as a pollution one. It is also a direct cost to the fisher: gear is expensive, and a lost set of traps is lost working capital.

PHAROS places this work under its fourth objective and builds on the earlier NETTAGplus project, extending that approach across the Atlantic and Arctic basins.

Three components: How workshops, acoustic tags and port recycling close the loop on fishing gear

The programme rests on three components that are designed to reinforce each other rather than run in parallel.

Awareness workshops. Three sessions per site, each pairing a short introduction with hands-on group work and plenary discussion. The first separates litter produced on board from litter caught at sea, and works through classifying, tracing and managing both. The second covers incidental catch and the wider footprint of the fishery energy efficiency, plastic reduction, fuel saving. The third is a feedback session on the programme itself and on planning peer outreach. Materials are produced in local languages and adapted to local practice.

Gear tagging. Acoustic transponders are fitted to gear so that it can be found again. Each tag carries a unique identifier and stays in a low-power listening state until it is interrogated by a surface locator unit connected to a phone or tablet, at ranges above 3 km. A mobile application combines triangulation with GPS to guide a boat back to its gear and to manage several tags at once. Trials are being run in Gran Canaria with the PESCATOBAL fishers’ cooperative, which has over 40 fishers and 16 boats working fish traps and gillnets.

Port collection and recycling. Dedicated containers in port give end-of-life nets somewhere to go other than the sea or landfill. An authorised waste manager collects them and they move on to a recycling plant to become new material. A handheld polymer identification device, Trinamix, is used to establish in real time which plastic a net actually is the step on which any traceability claim depends. The first collection at the Port of San Cristóbal in Gran Canaria removed 220 kg of discarded nets and gear.

From fisher to fisher

The delivery model matters as much as the content. The programme is explicitly peer-led: trusted local fishers facilitate the sessions, following the NETTAGplus method. The stated ambition is to shift how the sector is seen from a source of marine litter to a custodian of the waters it works in.

That framing is easy to dismiss as communications. It is better read as a design constraint. Gear recovery cannot be inspected into existence: nobody can observe a net being lost. A programme that depends on voluntary reporting, voluntary tagging and voluntary deposit has to be built on trust in the person delivering it, and fishers’ associations are where that trust already sits.

Where is it being tested, and at what scale?

Gran Canaria, Ireland and Iceland are the demonstration sites. The Danube Delta, Santorini, Lanzarote, the Azores and Cape Verde are replication sites. The target is to train about 80 fishers by 2028, to establish working collection systems in fishing ports, and to test gear-tracking technology under real conditions. Partners include CIIMAR as programme lead, PLOCAN as project coordinator and lead on the tagging trials, Gravity Wave on end-of-life gear management, and CSIC on methodology, with Living Lab coordinators handling local delivery.

Eighty fishers is a modest number against the size of the European fleet, and PHAROS does not present it as otherwise. The deliverable that matters for scale is the written one: a set of plans, guidelines and tools intended to work as a how-to manual, followed by a final effectiveness and impact report.

The questions worth keeping open

Three are unresolved by design, and the project is better judged on them than on tonnages.

First, recycling geography. Work in the Canary Islands includes logistics studies on whether nets can be recycled on-island or must be shipped to mainland Spain. If the answer is shipping, the carbon and cost of that leg have to be set against the benefit before the loop can be called circular.

Second, who pays for tags and locator units once a project stops buying them. A technology that works technically can still fail commercially at fleet scale.

Third, durability. Peer trust is the programme’s main asset and the hardest thing to measure. A port container is only useful while collection remains periodic and the waste-management chain stays reliable, which is an administrative question, not a scientific one.

How it connects to EU targets

The programme is aligned with the EU Mission “Restore our Ocean and Waters by 2030”, whose targets include at least 50% less plastic litter at sea, 30% fewer microplastics released and 50% lower nutrient losses. Gear recovery addresses the first two directly, and does so in the one litter category where prevention and recovery can be assigned to a specific group of people.