The sun is just starting to peak through the dense clouds on this late morning in April, as Buzz Scott hoists up a heavy wire lobster trap.
Scott is working with a small crew of fishermen, and the traps, and the jokes, are flying.
“See this is why fishermen have big bellies,” Scott said, as he uses his stomach to lift one of the traps and heave it onto the bed of a trailer.
Very few of these traps are usable. Some are caked with moss and mud. Others have been crushed. Curt Bryant, known to the guys as “Chief,” said the traps on this property have been sitting idle for years.
“This was all traps and it was all five high, four and five high like that,” Bryant said. “This whole thing was solid.”
This is a common scene up and down Maine’s coast — battered wire fishing traps piled high in a front yard, tucked back in the woods, or strewn along the shore after a storm. Wire pots wrapped with polyvinyl plastic replaced wooden, biodegradable traps in the 1980s, and they’ve been piling up since, shedding microplastics and creating hazards for birds and other creatures.
Scott’s truck is full, with more than 100 lobster traps neatly stacked Tetris-style. They’re ready to be hauled a short distance away for processing.
Scott’s non-profit, OceansWide, spends more than half the year on the water, training scuba divers to recover derelict, or “ghost gear,” from the seafloor. This past winter, he’s been working on shore, hauling thousands of abandoned traps piled around Vinalhaven.
“Guys can take the traps to the dump, and those traps go right into the landfill,” Scott said. “If we take the traps, we pull all those plastic parts and pieces off, the aluminum parts and pieces, and we recycle those.”
It’s not cheap, either. OceansWide, which relies on grants and donations to operate, estimates that it costs about $7 or $8 to recycle one old lobster trap on the mainland. Here on the island 13 miles offshore, it costs as much as $18. Fishermen are also compensated to help process the traps.
To prepare them for recycling, the traps are taken to a site not far from the island’s ferry landing.
On this morning, an assembly line of about eight fishermen are standing by.
“Right now I’m the one with the clippers,” Beba Rosen, a lobster boat captain from Vinalhaven, explains. “I’m cutting out all the bricks from the traps, and then it moves on to someone else. “And they’ll take out the vents and all the other plastic is removed from the traps. And that gets sent to plastic recycling.”
Then the trap moves on to the crusher. The flattened traps are shipped by ferry boat to a facility on the mainland, where the polyvinyl plastic is stripped from the traps and recycled or repurposed.
Since January, OceansWide and the crew have processed and recycled nearly 5,400 traps — more than 170 tons — from Vinalhaven alone. Scott believes they’ve only scratched the surface.
“I think there’s 60,000 to 100,000 traps on this island that need to be processed and removed,” he said.
Scott grew up on Matinicus but spent much of his childhood on Vinalhaven. He said he worried at first that fishermen might not be on board with what he was doing. But once they learned that OceansWide wanted to remove derelict traps from the waters surrounding the island, Scott said the fishermen started showing him where to search.
Then they asked Scott to help them remove old traps from the shore, and the initiative took off. Eventually, word spread on the island, he said, and fishermen started showing up to the processing site looking to help.
Over the last four months or so, Scott said more than 60 fishermen have brought him traps or asked his crew to remove traps from their yards. In some cases, fishermen have fallen into poor health and can’t remove the traps themselves.
“We’re just trying to make it look better and feel better. And feel better about ourselves, because who hasn’t thrown something overboard?” said Kelly Oxton of Vinalhaven.
She and her husband fish Vinalhaven and the other small islands nearby and spend their spare time collecting trash and abandoned junk on the shores.
This is their living, she said, and they want to protect the resource from any possible harm caused by the derelict traps.
“This is our island; we don’t have anything else,” she said. “This is our industry, and if this goes we away…. we’re just trying to preserve what we have.”
Back at the trap processing site, fishermen Curt Bryant and Flinn Robinson are getting ready to pick up another load of traps to bring to the crusher.
“Hopefully it happens all the way up and down the state of Maine on the coast, everybody starts something like this, get it cleaned up,” Bryant said.
Most of this crew will be back fishing soon. Despite the progress this winter, Buzz Scott believes the work of hauling and recycling traps on Vinalhaven, and Maine’s other large fishing communities will take years.
This story appears through a media partnership with Maine Public.
