Fishing vessels in Harlingen collected 176,600 kilos of litter from the sea last year. That is a record, and more than four times the annual average.
The joint fishermen in the Frisian port city today received a certificate from KIMO Netherlands and Belgium. That is an organization of coastal municipalities involved in the project ‘Fishing for Litter ‘strives for a cleaner sea.
“It is double. Of course it is not nice that there is so much waste in the sea. But with all the waste that is taken to the port, the sea becomes cleaner”, says Jan Joris Midavaine of KIMO at Omrop Fryslân. He points out that litter normally sinks to the sea floor. Now that is slowly but surely changing. “” We are hearing more and more positive stories from the sector; of the fishermen. They say: the places where we now fish, it is clean there. “
The MSC Zoe disaster
Fishing for Litter has been running since 2001. Never before has so much rubbish been collected in a harbor in a year. A record was also achieved nationally in 2019: 558,325 kilos of litter to be precise.
This is partly due to the fact that fishermen are more willing to take the waste to the port. But there was also more waste in the sea last year, mainly as a result of the MSC Zoe disaster. On New Year’s Day and January 2, 2019, almost 350 containers collapsed from the deck in stormy conditions, just northeast of the Dutch Wadden Islands.
Experts estimate that there are still some 800 tons of marine litter from the MSC Zoe in the sea. Fishing for Litter expects a new record of litter brought ashore by fishermen in 2020.
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