Dutch fishing vessels removed 756,000 kilos of litter from the sea last year. This has broken the record set in 2020, when 644,000 kilograms of waste were fished.
This is apparent from the annual report of the association KIMO Netherlands and Belgium, an organization of coastal municipalities that participates in the project Fishing for Litter strives for a cleaner sea. Through this project, fishermen collect litter that ends up in their nets. The waste is taken to land, where it is removed and processed.
According to the association, since the start of the project in 2001, so much litter has not been removed from the water in one year. Emergency transports were even necessary to provide the ports with ‘big-bags’, special bags in which the waste could be removed. “The ports went through their stock bags faster because of the large amounts of landed waste,” the association writes.
In 2019, a record amount of waste was also fished out of the sea: 558,325 kilos of litter. Most of this was collected by fishing vessels in Harlingen, about 176,600 kilos, wrote Omrop Fryslân earlier.
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