Abandoned fishing gear kills 100,000+ marine animals yearly and constitutes 46% of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch by mass

An estimated 5.7% of all fishing nets, 8.6% of traps and pots, and 29% of fishing lines used globally are lost, abandoned, or discarded at sea, totaling up to 1 million tonnes of 'ghost gear' entering the ocean annually according to the UN. This derelict gear continues to fish autonomously for years or decades, and surveys of the North Pacific show that abandoned fishing gear constitutes up to 46% of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch by mass. Why it matters: Ghost gear entangles and kills over 100,000 marine animals annually including endangered whales, sea turtles, and sharks, so populations of already threatened species face additional mortality pressure that compounds the effects of overfishing and habitat loss, so as nylon nets and lines slowly degrade over 400-600 years they fragment into microplastics that enter the marine food web, so roughly 170 trillion plastic particles weighing 2.3 million metric tonnes now circulate in ocean surface waters and bioaccumulate up the food chain, so humans consuming seafood are exposed to microplastic contamination with unknown long-term health consequences while cleanup costs escalate beyond the capacity of any single nation. The structural root cause is that fishing gear is designed for durability (nylon, polyethylene, polypropylene) with no biodegradability requirements, there is no deposit-return or extended producer responsibility scheme for commercial fishing gear in any major fishing nation, and the cost of retrieving lost gear from deep water ($2,000-10,000 per tonne) far exceeds the cost of replacement ($200-500 per net), creating zero economic incentive for recovery.