As our Ocean Team conducted a routine cleanup, they saw a dolphin about 3 and a half feet in size struggling on the water’s surface. They approached and discovered that the dolphin’s snout was entangled in an abandoned fishing net.

Every year, over 300,00 dolphins, whales, and porpoises get killed by ghost nets and plastic pollution. Drifting fishing gear left in the ocean creates a labyrinth that drowns and injures marine mammals. This disturbance reportedly affects the behavior and reproduction of cetaceans, causing long-term negative impacts on their population’s survival.

As bycatch continues to endanger the lives of sea animals in East Java, 4ocean’s Bali team came up with a brilliant idea to repurpose ghost nets into a trash collector. Our team retrieved discarded fishing nets, repaired them, and added buoys so they could install them in the water.

The repurposed buoys extend in a line across rivers, stopping floating plastic debris on its way to the ocean.