Kim Edwards is a fiber artist from Westerly, R.I. She makes colorful baskets and other creations out of discarded fishing gear. Her business is called Wrackline Creations, but she needs more material than what she can find lying on beaches.
That’s why she’s spending this spring day inside a New Bedford recycling warehouse, volunteering to unload a truck.
"Today I'm helping them unload the rope that came down from Maine. So I've been waiting for this since last year," she said, "and once everything is unloaded, then I'll pick more colors."
Inside the box truck is over 9,400 pounds of lobster trap line from Matinicus Island, which sits about 20 miles off the coast of Maine. The delivery was expected to arrive last fall, but winter weather set in early.
Eva Marray drove the truck down from Matinitus. She said the first trial was getting off the island, which doesn’t have daily ferry service.
"And they cancel and postpone ferries all the time, if the wave height is forecast to be high," she said. "And, thankfully, we had a good marine forecast this week. You can only get reservations for trucks if you make them months ahead of time. So, it's kind of a leap of faith that it's even going to work. So, I'm sort of relieved to be here."
“Here” is the nonprofit Net Your Problem’s 4,000 square foot warehouse. Alex Buchanan manages the space.
"It's been a three day excursion from them collecting all the material from the fishermen there, loading it onto a truck and shipping it to the mainland," Buchanan said.
As a rope artist with a maritime background, including service in the Coast Guard, Buchanan is uniquely suited to manage Net Your Problem's New Bedford Warehouse.
"Net Your Problem absorbs discarded material from the commercial fishing industry that usually ends up sitting in open yards just wasting away," he explained. "We take those materials and find recycling plants to ship them off to so they can be reused or reincorporated into newer materials."
Half of the warehouse is filled with nets and rope collected by Net Your Problem. The other half is filled with sorted debris collected from local beaches by the Center for Coastal Studies’ volunteer Beach Brigade.
Artists like Edwards, who incorporate marine debris into their work, can shop the warehouse for supplies. The beach cleanup materials are free. Rope collected by Net Your Problem is 75 cents a pound.
Buchanan explained, "Some of these art materials that people use … they become socially relevant and it seems like marine debris is an increasingly popular medium to use for artists right now.”
But not everything brought into the warehouse is snatched up for reuse. So Net Your Problem sorts and ships what they can off for recycling.
Nicole Baker founded Net Your Problem in 2018, when she was working as a fisheries observer in Alaska.
"In some of the places that I worked on boats, it was just like nets were just sitting around in piles that fishermen were paying to store, essentially, because they didn't really have an idea of what to do with them," she said.
Most nets and lines can be recycled, because they’re made of plastic. But Baker says there aren’t many recycling plants that can handle ropes and nets – even if they’re made out of the same plastic as a yogurt container.
From her home base in Homer, Alaska, Baker sources marine waste from up and down both coasts of the United States. West Coast waste gets recycled in British Columbia and, in the case of gill nets, Slovenia. Recyclable East Coast waste is shipped from the New Bedford warehouse to a recycling plant in Denmark.
"It seems kind of far away," Baker admits, "but it's actually cheaper and lower carbon emissions for us to do that than it would be to send it somewhere in the United States to have it recycled. And a lot of recycling factories in the U.S. just aren't set up to process that kind of material."
But, Baker says, all this work means nothing, if there isn’t consumer demand for recycled plastic products.
"It really, really helps if people buy products that are made from recycled plastic," she said. "So providing that demand for the product will encourage companies then to make it and to source the plastic from us or from the recyclers that we use."
As for gear that’s too far degraded to be reused or recycled – and ropes that weave together different types of plastic and aren’t recyclable – Baker says there are still options to keep that waste out of the landfill.
"It can be burned to generate electricity," she explained. "It can be shredded to make a concrete additive. It can turned back into oil, which is where plastic comes from, through the process of pyrolysis."
Baker says option number one is getting the materials in the hands of people like Kim Edwards who can look at a pile of old rope and find just what she needs. And it's no coincidence that this load of rope is particularly chromatic.
"When they were collecting this line in Maine, they prioritized the pretty colors," Baker said. "Maine has a lot of that. Massachusetts has less. And we prioritized bringing that down, because we knew that that would be what they were interested in."
Even before the truck was unloaded, Edwards found just what she was hoping for.
"Actually I just pulled this right here which has lavender and this pink," Edwards said, holding up a length of rope. "So right now it looks very dirty and once you wash it all these bright beautiful colors come out."
Colors Edwards says will make for a beautiful basket.
