Wire lobster traps have been stacking up along the Maine coast for forty years — in front yards, back in the woods, strewn across the shore after a storm, and in their tens of thousands on the seafloor. This winter, on one island thirteen miles offshore, a crew of fishermen finally started shipping them out.
Since January, the non-profit OceansWide and a rotating crew of Vinalhaven fishermen have processed and recycled nearly 5,400 traps — more than 170 tons — from that island alone. Buzz Scott, who runs OceansWide and spends more than half the year training scuba divers to recover derelict gear from the bottom, does not think that is close to the end of it.
"I think there's 60,000 to 100,000 traps on this island that need to be processed and removed," Scott told Maine Public.
The problem starts with a material change nobody thought much about at the time. Wire pots wrapped in polyvinyl plastic replaced wooden, biodegradable traps in the 1980s. Wooden traps rotted. These do not.
"Guys can take the traps to the dump, and those traps go right into the landfill," Scott said. "If we take the traps, we pull all those plastic parts and pieces off, the aluminum parts and pieces, and we recycle those."
That is more expensive than it sounds. OceansWide, which runs on grants and donations, puts the cost of recycling a single trap at roughly $7 or $8 on the mainland — and as much as $18 out on Vinalhaven, where everything moves by ferry. Fishermen are paid to help process them.
The work itself is an assembly line near the island's ferry landing. "Right now I'm the one with the clippers," said Beba Rosen, a lobster boat captain from Vinalhaven. "I'm cutting out all the bricks from the traps, and then it moves on to someone else. And they'll take out the vents and all the other plastic is removed from the traps. And that gets sent to plastic recycling." The stripped traps go through a crusher, onto a dump truck, onto the ferry.
Not everyone in the fleet was convinced this was worth doing. Devyn Campbell, a Boothbay Harbor fisherman who has worked on gear removal for years and joined the Gulf of Maine Lobster Foundation's programme in 2025, has heard the argument plenty of times.
"These old guys say, 'Oh, well, it just disappears. What are you doing that for?' And it's like, 'Well, it doesn't really. It just gets smaller.' That vinyl coating is all PVC. So that wears down, and that just turns into microplastics," Campbell told the Boothbay Register.
The scale offshore is harder to picture. Laura Ludwig, who directs the Marine Debris and Plastics Program at the Center for Coastal Studies in Provincetown, works the ghost gear that pollutes the Gulf of Maine from Cape Cod Bay to the Bay of Fundy. Around 3 million lobster trap tags are issued annually for the Gulf of Maine alone, she noted, and thousands of traps are lost every year.
"There's millions of dead lobster traps on the Gulf of Maine bottom," Ludwig told ecoRI News.
The Gulf of Maine Lobster Foundation estimates 175,000 traps are lost in the Gulf every year, and puts the combined cost to the industry — lost revenue plus replacement gear — at about $16 million.
Lost gear does not stop fishing. Derelict traps keep catching lobster and fish that nobody ever hauls, and roughly 90% of species caught in ghost gear are commercially valuable, according to WWF figures cited by ecoRI. Worse, the debris knots together. Emma Weed, a programme manager at the Gulf of Maine Lobster Foundation who runs the Gear Grab effort with around 40 Maine fishermen, described the result.
"It's like a sea monster, and it will grab anything that's around it. It's usually rope, traps, all kinds of things that are all separate at one point in time. And through the tides and the currents, they wrap around each other. And then that can drag active gear into it," Weed said. The largest such gear ball found in the Boothbay region weighed around 3,700 pounds. Weed says they can reach roughly 56,000.
Money for this work is now arriving from a national pot. William & Mary's Batten School of Coastal & Marine Sciences & VIMS, which administers the National Fishing Trap Removal, Assessment and Prevention (TRAP) Program under an $8 million NOAA Marine Debris Program grant, awarded $1.8 million to 13 organisations across nine states for cleanups beginning in January 2026. The first round put $1.4 million into 11 projects and pulled more than 7,000 traps — over 300,000 pounds — off the bottom.
"We are thrilled with the initial results from our inaugural TRAP Program recipients. Their success is a testament to the impact that locally-designed solutions can have on global issues," said Kirk Havens, director of the Batten School & VIMS Center for Coastal Resources Management.
The economics are not marginal. A 2016 report cited by the TRAP Program found that removing just 10% of derelict crab pots and lobster traps worldwide could add $831 million a year in landings.
On Vinalhaven, the argument is smaller and more personal. Kelly Oxton, who fishes the island and its neighbours with her husband and spends spare time clearing junk off the shore, was blunt about why the fleet came around.
"We're just trying to make it look better and feel better. And feel better about ourselves, because who hasn't thrown something overboard?" she said. "This is our island; we don't have anything else. This is our industry, and if this goes we away — we're just trying to preserve what we have."
More than 60 fishermen brought Scott traps or asked his crew to clear their yards over four months. Some had fallen into poor health and could not shift the piles themselves. Curt Bryant, known on the crew as "Chief," wants the model copied.
"Hopefully it happens all the way up and down the state of Maine on the coast, everybody starts something like this, get it cleaned up," Bryant said.
Most of that crew is back fishing now. The removal programmes run late fall to early spring — the Gulf of Maine Lobster Foundation cleared 45 to 55 tons along the Maine coast between October and the end of the season, with Campbell hauling 30 to 40 traps on a good day. At Vinalhaven's rate, clearing the island's own backlog is a decade of winters.
