main cause of plastic pollution in our oceans?? Fishing nets

has any one seen the new movie on netflix called Seaspiracy? They claim the main cause of plastic in the ocean is fishing nets.
They also talk about the horrors of fishing.
the only solution they give is to stop eating fish all together.
Very interesting movie. I am curious about people thoughts who have watched it

Conversation about ocean pollution has largely centered on consumer waste, particularly plastic straws. But straws account for less than 1 percent of all plastic entering the ocean. In Seaspiracy, narrator and director Tabrizi turns scrutiny toward the greatest single source of plastic in the ocean: discarded fishing gear. Fishing nets alone comprise 46 percent of the “great Pacific garbage patch.” Tabrizi notes that “longline fishing sets enough fishing lines to wrap around the entire planet 500 times every single day,” one of many staggering statistics cited in the film. www.forksoverknives.com...#:~:text=In%20Seaspiracy%2C%20narrator%20and%20d irector,the%20ocean%3A%20discarded%20fishing%20gear.&text=Tabrizi%20notes%20that%20%E2%80%9Clongline%20fishing,statistics%20cited%20in%20the%20film.

a reply to: HODOSKE
Stop eating and drinking EVERYTHING. Dont wear any clothes, nor stay in, nor build a house...definitely, DONT leave where you are presently, as your outbreath is toxic and movement makes you a "spreader!"

There, now that nobody is living...aint life perfect?

Plastic? That mostly harmless stuff?

The real chemical threat is dihydrogen monoxide. It is the most used industrial solvent on the planet. As a consiquence or this, it is the cause of more deaths every year in people and animals of all kind, more than any other industrial chemical. Please monitor your intake of dihydrogen monoxide because too much will make you sick when drinking it and if you go beyond that, it can actually kill you. It is more deadly if accidentally inhailed. Thousands of people die every year of inhailing dihydrogen monoxide.

Please be careful when using dihydrogen monoxide, it has the potential to kill you.


I would think that a large net would be easy to recover from the surface of that salinated dihydrogen monoxide. The sinkers need to be attached with fasteners that rot away quickly so that the rest of the net will float. Maby no one is interested in doing it until recycling the nets becomes profitable.

a reply to: beyondknowledge

Got to love the dichotomy of dihydrogen monoxide.

As far as fishing net and line plastic, the surge in insisting fish be "wild-caught" probably doesn't help the situation. #2 I wonder if the more biodegradable hemp plastic might be a better alternative. I don't see fishing being given up on, but serious efforts to clean up and find alternative methods.

I occasionally come across lost trawling nets while deep sea fishing. When they first started showing up decades ago we called them "cargo nets" because we thought they were holddown nets which had become dislodged from cargo vessels during stormy weather. To come across one of these nets in the open ocean is a boon.

As the nets drift, algae and other sea life like barnacles begins to grow on them. The nets then become homes to small fish which feed on the algae and stuff. Guess what likes to eat small fish? Soon large numbers of open ocean predators start to gather. Dolphin (mahimahi), tuna (ahi, aku), wahoo (ono). They are all there in a nice package just waiting for our lures and bait.

Of course, the nets are killers. That's what they are designed to do. Whales, turtles, dolphins (the mammal type) get caught in these lost nets and die. When the nets reach shallow waters they tumble and entangle on the reef, destroying acres of coral and killing yet more sea life. And the parts that are exposed to ultraviolet light do break down into the tiny particles known as microplastics. Before very much longer, beaches will be a blue green color as the microplastics begin to outnumber the sand particles. But the nets are not the only source of that plastic.

It's not really known what impacts other than the aesthetics are but it is known that tiny sea life, plankton (the bottom of the food chain), consumes microplastics. If these critters are filling up on plastic, are they obtaining any nutrition from it? Can they provide sustenance to creatures higher up the food chain?

Yeah, the nets are great fishing if you come across one out in the deep blue. Before the nets started showing up we would look for logs that had come from the northwest. If we were really lucky we might find a 30 foot log. Good fishing around something like that. But that was back when one of those logs wasn't quite as valuable as they are now and the loggers wouldn't bother chasing them down if they got away on the way downstream, up in the northwest.

originally posted by: beyondknowledge
Plastic? That mostly harmless stuff?

The real chemical threat is dihydrogen monoxide. It is the most used industrial solvent on the planet. As a consiquence or this, it is the cause of more deaths every year in people and animals of all kind, more than any other industrial chemical. Please monitor your intake of dihydrogen monoxide because too much will make you sick when drinking it and if you go beyond that, it can actually kill you. It is more deadly if accidentally inhailed. Thousands of people die every year of inhailing dihydrogen monoxide.

Please be careful when using dihydrogen monoxide, it has the potential to kill you.


I would think that a large net would be easy to recover from the surface of that salinated dihydrogen monoxide. The sinkers need to be attached with fasteners that rot away quickly so that the rest of the net will float. Maby no one is interested in doing it until recycling the nets becomes profitable.

As I recall, dihydrogen monoxide killed nearly a quarter million people in Indonesia earlier this century...

Where is the outrage? This chemical is not only insidious... it's inherently racist.

Nestle has been trying to corner the market of this scourge upon humanity... it begs the question, why?

You're under presenting the dangers of dihydrogen monoxide, the stuff is everywhere and even inside materials like wood.

We're screwed, like, Archimedes type of screw

originally posted by: beyondknowledge
Plastic? That mostly harmless stuff?

The real chemical threat is dihydrogen monoxide. It is the most used industrial solvent on the planet. As a consiquence or this, it is the cause of more deaths every year in people and animals of all kind, more than any other industrial chemical. Please monitor your intake of dihydrogen monoxide because too much will make you sick when drinking it and if you go beyond that, it can actually kill you. It is more deadly if accidentally inhailed. Thousands of people die every year of inhailing dihydrogen monoxide.

Please be careful when using dihydrogen monoxide, it has the potential to kill you.


I would think that a large net would be easy to recover from the surface of that salinated dihydrogen monoxide. The sinkers need to be attached with fasteners that rot away quickly so that the rest of the net will float. Maby no one is interested in doing it until recycling the nets becomes profitable.

If we could only remove the nets from the salinated dihydrogen monoxide, it would be safer for sea life. My question is why do the fishing boats not try to recover, repair, and reuse the nets. The repair work would be hard and take a while but the useable net could probably be sold for half the price of a new one.


Dont forget it is not just the liquid form of dihydrogen monoxide that is deadly at times. Both the gas and solid form are also deadly under many circumstances. Dihydrogen monoxide can be easily turned into a gas by heating. This can be used for many things, even powering ships. If this gas escapes, the loose gas can actually cook people in the same ships. If a ship encounters a large lump of solid dihydrogen monoxide, the hull of the ship is sometimes penetrated by this solid form allowing the liquid form to enter the hull causing the ship to sink.

Dihydrogen monoxide, that is dangerous stuff in all forms.

originally posted by: BlueJacket
Stop eating and drinking EVERYTHING.

No. Just be selective on what you eat, drink and buy. Take time to understand the provenance of what you buy. Don't buy stuff which you suspect has been sourced in ways which are harmful to the environment, or from countries wih poor standards.

There's nothing more depressing than seeing a dead seabird tangled in plastic, a turtle drowned in a discarded fishing net, or a seal slowly chocking on fishing line. You can change things by changing your own buying habits.

The Chinese have machines that 2 men can build fishing nets faster than a team of 10 men can fix damaged nets.

Most Chinese fishing boats carry so many nets that as one net gets to damaged they just replace it from the stockpile they carry onboard.

www.made-in-china.com...

In China plastics waste is taken from dumps and recycled into fishing nets that are then dumped at sea as they are damaged.

There are a estimated 800,000 Chinese fishing boats operating worldwide even in the Atlantic Ocean and supplied by large factory and supply ships.
Some Chinese fishermen have been known to spend up to 3 years at sea.

800,000 Chinese fishing boats dumping 5 to 10 nets a year adds up to a lot of plastic waste in the oceans of the world.

The Chinese just plain don't care about plastic pollution in the oceans or about any pollution in the ocean.

a reply to: ANNED

The Chinese just plain don't care about plastic pollution in the oceans or about any pollution in the ocean.

That's obviously not limited to the Chinese though. That pretty much applies to most people in general.

a reply to: paraphi
I think my point was lost on you, but I didn't provide a complete thought.

I agree with you to a degree, our problem as a globe is applying that "discrimination" at the appropriate point in the "timeline."

Watched it, was surprised the main plastic pollutant was fishing nets.
The footage from the fishing ships was pretty gruesome with the amounts of "by-catch".