Net Your Problem Plans for New Warehouse in Newport, Oregon

Eight years into repurposing commercial fishing nets into multiple useable products, entrepreneur Nicole Baker’s newest goal is establishing a warehouse in Newport, Oregon, to meet new requirements for separate cleaning of a variety of plastics.

“That’s the new focus for us this year and also to expand to collecting worn out plastic gear from cruise ships, barges and aquaculture firms,” Baker said Feb. 6 at an environmental forum in Anchorage.

Since Baker began her mission in 2017 to get the massive amount of commercial fisheries equipment waste washing up on coastal shores off the beaches and in dumps into usable products, her company has collected some 2.2 million pounds of plastics, she said.

Under recent rules of the Basel-Rotterdam-Stockholm agreement, each variety of plastic must be exported to buyers in separate containers, requiring more specific levels net cleaning, Baker said.

Each net must be taken apart separately, depending on the variety of plastics it is made of.

The fishermen pay Net Your Problem to take the nets. The company then cleans them and bales them up for recycling companies that pay Baker for the plastics to produce a wide variety of products, from shopping bags and knife handles to bicycle seats, sneakers and more.

This summer, plans are to move nets collected but yet to be cleaned to Newport, where there will be more people available to participate in the plastic cleaning process, she said.

Along with plastics already acquired from Alaska, Washington, Oregon, California, Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Florida, Baker said, she and her staff are working to start collecting discarded marine plastics from New Jersey.

The company also encourages others wishing to repurpose used marine plastics to contact them at https://www.netyourproblem.com.

Net Your Problem recently purchased a baler being used at the Kachemak Gear Shed marine supply store in Homer to bale up seine and gillnets, as well as cardboard. A baler is a hydraulic press that compacts materials into a dense package.

“Having a baler means you can do a lot of different kind of recycling,” she said.

Last summer, Baker toured fishing ports in California and spoke with crab fishermen at the Port of San Francisco about launching a reuse initiative there.

“By year’s end, Seaside Weavers, a group dedicated to repurposing marine materials, had picked up over 1,000 pounds of rope from our collection point to craft into their beautiful, handwoven mats and baskets,” she said. “This collaboration highlights the power of partnerships in creating sustainable solutions and given new life to discarded materials.”

Along with processing used plastics already collected, Net Your Problem is working on increased outreach and improved waste management practices within other maritime industries such as aquaculture, shipping and tourism, Baker said.

“We will also be assisting our partners at CoastSavers to collect and recycle marine debris from their beach cleanups in Washington, starting a new collection spot for Area M fishermen in Sand Point, Alaska, filling up their warehouse in Massachusetts, recycling in Bristol Bay for the fourth year and continuing to find markets for processed fishing gear plastic,” she said.

“Because Net Your Problem is a for-profit company, contributions to the firm are not tax-deductible,” she said, “but we promise to use your money in the most impactful way we can.”

Source: https://fishermensnews.com/net-your-problem-plans-for-new-warehouse-in-newport-oregon/