All a bit crabby in Brixham!
Well, it has been a busy few months! You may have already seen our crab line & drop net recycling stations, if you are local or have visited our beautiful town, so I thought I should give you a little more insight to this little project.
We had the discussing last year about how we could reduce the impact of plastic crabbing waste, primarily caused by recreational crabbers, and the problem was highlighted further by a social media post from Stoke Gabriel Mill Pond. A good friend of ours had pulled out over 50 nets & lines, it was quite shocking to see. Something had to be done!
We shared the post on our social media page & soon drummed up significant support from locals & local businesses, even the local town council wanted to help. It was not soon after our initial post that Looe Marine Conservation Group got in touch with a scheme they had already put in place. It was the perfect solution and in no time at all we had 6 sponsored recycling stations on their way to us.
So, what was going to happen to all this recycling material I hear you ask? Well, fortunately we also had a solution for that. Rob at Odyssey Innovations had already installed a scheme which collected the commercial waste nets from our fishing fleet & he was more than happy to include the crab nets & line within that pickup. Odyssey Innovations send the material to be processed, it is then returned to them to make into ocean kayaks! Pretty cool, eh?
As part of this initiative, we also wanted to tackle the use of the plastic gear and give consumers in Brixham a non-plastic alternative.
The response from local traders has been overwhelming, all the shops we spoke to stock the non-plastic version now also, we also stock them on our website & we are also looking to introduce a free use & return scheme for Ecco lines.
The final piece to the crab recycling puzzle was people power. The support via social media has been amazing, so many positive comments about the project & everyone seems very keen to make it work. We have also been recruiting some amazing volunteers to help us collect & process the material.