Net Your Problem, Recycling and Upcycling Fishing Gear - Nicole Baker
About Nicole Baker
Nicole Baker with her Net Your Problem company has created a system that offers a solution to the disposal of used fishing gear. Net Your Problem collects used ropes and nets from fishers in Alaska, Maine, Massachusetts, and California and passes it on to recyclers and artists. Since it began in 2017, Net Your Problem has recycled more than 1.2 Million pounds of fishing gear.
Turning Fishing Gear Waste into Solutions with Net Your Problem
“We’re solving problems not just talking about them because that’s what we need to do.”
Nicole Baker is an entrepreneur who grew up in Upstate New York. Her family had zero connection to commercial fishing yet she knew from the time she was in fifth grade that she wanted to be a marine biologist. It wasn’t until she went to college in Rhode Island that she lived near the ocean. After college she landed in a job as a North Pacific Ground Fish Observer. As such she deployed on commercial fishing vessels where her job was to record information about such things as the sex, size and species that the boats caught. She talks about life about a trawler, a boat that drags a net.
During her time in the working on commercial vessels, she noticed that crab lines and trawl nets were gathering in all sorts of places on line because it was inconvenient to get the gear into landfills. As a result, the fishers were paying indefinitely to store their old gear. Nicole likened it to paying to leave your garbage in the front yard of your house. So rather than being seen as an environmental nuisance it was a financial burden. Her Net Your Problem business works to convince the fishers that paying her to take their nets and ship them to a recycler is both economical and the right thing to do. Nicole’s view of shipping the nets to Denmark to a company that mechanically recycles netting from the marine industry is that it is the right thing to do. For her recycling is supplying raw materials to industry.
The business model is different in Maine where fishers don’t have the same costs to store or dispose of their gear. In Maine the ropes and nets are sold to artists who use the materials to create artwork. The economics are sufficient to pay for NYP storage and staff but aren’t of a similar scale to that in Alaska. When asked how individuals can make a difference, Nicole advises that we can all be informed consumers. We need to know where stuff comes from, what it is manufactured from, and to vote with our dollars. If we choose not to buy something, companies won’t want to sell those products.
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Pamela Ferris-Olson (00:01): Today on the Women Mind the Water Artivist series, I'm speaking with Nicole Baker. Nicole isn't an artist in the traditional sense. We're going to explore how she's creating a network that offers a solution for the disposal of used fishing gear. She's created a business that collects used fishing gear and passing it on to recyclers and upsides. The Women Mind The Water Artivist Series podcast on womenmindthewater.com engages artists in conversation about their work and explores their connection with the ocean. Through their stories, Women Mind the Water hopes to inspire and encourage action to protect the ocean and her creatures. My guest on the Women Mind the Water are the series is Nicole Baker. Nicole is a former North Pacific ground fisheries observer for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
(00:56): During her six years collecting data for a scientific assessment of commercial fish stocks, she noticed lots of old fishing gear lying around. After learning about an organization that partnered with an athletic shoe company to transform fishing nets into shoes, Nicole chartered her own course and founded Net Your Problem. Since it began in 2017 Net Your Problem has recycled more than 1.2 million pounds of fishing gear in far found places like Alaska, Maine, and California. Welcome, Nicole. I think my listeners will be interested to hear about your journey and the work you are doing. You, like other artivists, are interested in creating conversations about problems that impact the ocean and hope that their work inspires positive change. Yet your problem is undertaking collaboration, community building and plain hard work needed to get the job done. I am looking forward to hearing more.
(02:00): Let's begin by finding out how you came to be a North Pacific ground fisheries observer for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Before we explore that, let me ask you where you grew up and whether your family was involved in commercial fishing.
Nicole Baker (02:17): Thanks, Pam. I'm so excited to be here today to talk about my journey and how we're solving problems, not just talking about them because that's what we need to do. I originally grew up in upstate New York, so from Buffalo, which is very close to Canada, and my family had absolutely zero connection to commercial fishing. We did not live near the ocean though we did live near lakes, but for whatever reason, I just knew from when I was in fifth grade that I wanted to be a marine biologist and haven't deviated from that path since I was about 12.
Pamela Ferris-Olson (02:56): So tell me a little bit about commercial fishing. It isn't an easy life. One contends with weather, the demands of physical labor and long times at sea. Even in summer, the waters of Alaska are cold and treacherous, not to mention it's daylight for nearly 24 hours. How does a young woman, particularly one from upstate New York, find herself aboard a commercial fishing vessel based off the coast of Alaska?
Nicole Baker (03:26): Well, I went to college in Rhode Island, so Roger Williams University. I did that to get my bachelor's in marine biology. And so that was my first sort of move and live next to the ocean and get all the experience with those saltwater creatures. I graduated college and was looking for jobs and really couldn't find anything that paid enough to justify me spending money on an undergraduate education. So I decided to go to graduate school and that didn't really work out either. I wasn't very interested in the topic that I got a grant to research, which was sea turtle nesting. So few other random things happened. I managed a hotel in the Bahamas and a bunch of other things while I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do. But the job that you mentioned earlier, the North Pacific groundfish observer job was something that only required you to have a bachelor's degree and it paid pretty well.
(04:28): And I didn't really know anything about commercial fishing at the time, but I thought, hey, let's give this a try. You only had to sign up for a 90 day contract. So we went to Seattle, we got all the training that we needed over a three week period of time at the NOAA facility, and then I got deployed onto commercial fishing vessels. So that job basically requires you to live on a fishing vessel with a crew. Go fishing when they go fishing, you're in town when they're in town delivering their catch. And you're collecting data on what they're catching, where they're catching it, what species, what sex, what size, and all of that information gets reported to the National Fisheries Management Service, which does the stock assessments that you mentioned earlier. So that was how I ended up in Alaska on these boats.
(05:24): And I loved the job. I did that for five years on and off, so signed up for these 90 day contracts and then would go on adventures around the world in between and then I'd be broke and then I would come back to Alaska and refill my bank account. And so I just did that for a period of five years.
Pamela Ferris-Olson (05:44): Interesting. So I think it would be insightful to understand what life aboard a commercial fishing boat is like. Can you describe for us what it's like to work on one of these boats?
Nicole Baker (05:55): So the boats that I worked on were trawlers, which is a form of fishing where you drag a net behind the boat and it captures the fish that are in the path. And so when the net is in the water, there's not really much work happening. We're having lunch, we're reading books, we're watching movies, we're drinking coffee and chatting. But then when it's time to either put the net in the water or take the net out of the water, that's when the work happens. And so for me, when the fishermen were putting the net in the water, I was just marking down, okay, this is the day and the time that they're setting the net. That was all of my responsibilities at that time.
(06:43): The fishermen would put the net in the water and it would be in for a variety of amounts of time. Sometimes 15 minutes, sometimes 12 hours, just depends how good the fishing is. Any recreational fishermen will also know that sometimes it takes you all day to catch one or sometimes it's on your first cast. But then when the net is full and the fishermen bring it back on board, that's when my job really started. And so we took random samples of different weights of fish during the course of taking all of the fish out of the net and pouring it into the tank where it gets refrigerated and stays cold. And so we would take maybe 50 pounds of fish every couple of minutes, and then later on I would sort of work up that fish, which is to say that I would count them and weigh them and figure out what species they were and measure some and open the bellies of some and see if that was male or female.
(07:47): And so that was basically our routine, that there were periods of a lot of activity when we were setting the net or hauling back the net, also dispersed with periods of relaxing and hanging out. And it didn't matter what day of the week it was, what time it was, if it was a holiday. So when you're fishing, you're just on this schedule of we're either fishing or we're not fishing because the net can be filled with fish on the 4th of July at three o'clock in the morning and you don't say, oh sorry, it's a holiday, I'm off, I'm not working today. That's not how it works.
Pamela Ferris-Olson (08:28): So in the opening I said that during your time working on fishing boats, you noticed lots of old fishing gear lying around. What sort of gear did you see, and what was your understanding of what would be done with that gear?
Nicole Baker (08:43): The first place that I observed all of this was in Dutch Harbor, which is, I think people may know from the TV show Deadliest Catch. That's where the crab fishing reality show on Discovery Channel takes place. So there was crab line, there was trawl nets piled up in all kinds of different storage yards all around the island. And it was my understanding that that is where it would stay because if you wanted to take something to the landfill, it needed to be in what's called a super sack. So this is just a big polypropylene sort of canvassy kind of bag that is four feet by four feet by four feet. And these large nets that the fishermen were using to catch fish would not fit in those bags. So the nets were not something that could be taken to the landfill. So a lot of them were just in storage because there was not another good option of how to dispose of them.
Pamela Ferris-Olson (09:46): So what sorts of problems might this discarded gear cause?
Nicole Baker (09:51): Well, I think primarily it's just a waste of resources. That it's taking up space on land, that it's not being recycled if it could or turned into energy if it could. It's just like if we would at our homes, just leave our garbage in our front yard because we didn't have a garbage truck to come and pick it up. So this stuff was not really at risk of entering the marine environment necessarily because it was all on land, but it was just something that you think, this isn't really what we should be doing with this.
Pamela Ferris-Olson (10:28): I like your analogy of the garbage sitting in your yard. I'm also horrified that there's all this polypropylene going into the landfall 'cause it's not going to deteriorate. So when you decided to build an enterprise addressing the problem, where did you begin? If the nets aren't emissions, at least in terms of being a problem in the fishing on the piers, but they're taking up space, I would imagine that people are happy to give them to you. But then what?
Nicole Baker (11:04): So the fishermen in Dutch Harbor specifically where I started were actually paying for that storage space. So they were leasing land from the native corporation that owned it. And so they were essentially even worse than just leaving garbage in your front yard, paying to leave garbage in your front yard. And so although it wasn't an environmental nuisance necessarily, it was a financial burden on the companies. And so that's what I tried to communicate in the beginning, that recycling is the right thing to do, this is how we should be disposing of stuff. And ultimately it's going to save you money over the long run if you've been paying to store something there for 20 years. But all of that wasn't really possible for me to do until I found some place to send the nets to.
(11:56): I found a recycling facility in Denmark that was set up specifically to mechanically recycle netting in line from the maritime industry. And so I set up the business basically as a way to move stuff from where I knew it was to where I knew it could be recycled. And that's basically how the business was born.
Pamela Ferris-Olson (12:23): That's quite interesting that you've got nets in Alaska and they're going to go and be recycled in Denmark. So do you have a big enough scale to be self-sufficient or do you need grants to make this business work?
Nicole Baker (12:40): We charge the fishermen or the fishing industry to dispose of their waste. We also receive revenue by selling the netting to the recycling companies. And so a lot of people, myself included, when I was young, 20 something, thought that recycling is just about saving the planet and doing the right thing. But in reality, recycling is about supplying raw materials to other industries, primarily the manufacturing industry. So even though we think about stuff that we put in our recycling as garbage, actually it is a resource for someone else and that someone else is willing to pay to get that material into their supply chain.
Pamela Ferris-Olson (13:28): And I can see the benefit. If I'm paying every year to have that space taken up by my netting and somebody comes along and says, you can pay me once and I'll get it off your plate, that people would want those. So that's the model in Alaska. I think your model in Maine is different and unlike Alaska, I don't believe that the fishery pays to drop off their gear. I know some money comes in from artists who buy the rope by the town. 'Cause I've been to the Net Your Problem rope depot in Maine because I needed some netting for an art project. I was surprised to find how beautiful the gear was. One net I bought was a teal blue and there were ropes in shades of blue and red and orange. But I can't imagine you make any money from the sale of small volume to artists to have a successful business.
Nicole Baker (14:28): Our model in Maine is a little different in that we found that there was this huge artist community, yourself included, Pam, that was looking for these kinds of materials to weave into mats or baskets or wreaths or make any kind of other art projects. And so we thought, okay, well, why don't we start this rope depot and see how this goes? We're going to bring in stuff from fishermen and we're going to see if people are interested in purchasing it from us. And the sale of those materials actually does pretty much cover the rental of the rope depot and paying for the Net Your Problem's staff time to manage that. But you're right, if we do want to do a large scale reformation shall we say, of how lines and netting gets disposed of in Maine, that we need a different model. And so the incentives are very different in Maine than they are in Alaska, Massachusetts also where we have another recently hired representative and we hope to have a warehouse soon.
(15:42): So whereas you can't take fishing gear to the landfill in Dutch Harbor and it costs a lot of money to store something, the incentives are different in Maine. You can take stuff to the landfill and people could just keep things for free in their front yard. So we can't have the same business model in Alaska that we have in Maine because if I say, well, we're going to charge X amount and you have to do this and you have to do that, they're going to say, no thanks. I've got all these other options that are much cheaper. So why would people participate in recycling? So we've had to think very differently about how we offer our services in New England.
Pamela Ferris-Olson (16:26): Well, I applaud you for A, thinking outside the box and B, including artists and other creative groups. So what is your greatest challenge in building this enterprise?
Nicole Baker (16:42): Well, you mentioned before that you didn't think that nets were a nuisance or that maybe fishermen wouldn't think that nets are a nuisance. And I think that's kind of it. Traditionally when you start a business, you are solving a problem and hopefully you're doing it better, cheaper, faster, easier than your competition, which is going to bring you customers. Our business is not like that at all. First we have to convince fishermen that they have a problem, that taking something to the landfill or leaving it in their front yard or taking it to the incinerator is a problem, that it's not the best way to get rid of their materials at their end of life. So that's the first thing, is doing this communication with our potential customers that they even have a problem. And then once we've managed to do that, then we have to say, okay, but actually recycling is more difficult than taking something to the landfill because you have to sort it.
(17:47): Same way you have to sort your recyclables at home, we have to sort fishing gear into the different plastic types, so that takes more time and is more difficult. And sometimes recycling can be more expensive than taking it to the landfill or taking it to the incinerator. So we've got kind of an uphill battle with burst convincing people that there is a problem and then that solution is more expensive and takes more time. So it really is about trying to convince people that this is the right thing to do, that we should be responsibly disposing of our waste and figuring out how to do that that makes it easy for them because if it's difficult, we know they're not going to participate. So for all of those reasons, we have an uphill battle and things take a long time, but I think we're getting there.
Pamela Ferris-Olson (18:36): Well, I'm exhausted and I applaud you for keeping going. So you've provided a window into the world of commercial fishing, even a little window, and you are, we'll call it a porthole. And you are-
Nicole Baker (18:49): There we go, Pam.
Pamela Ferris-Olson (18:51): And you were someone who's trying to make a difference in terms of reducing ocean pollution or just making sure that things that aren't normally recycled are. And I'd appreciate it if you'd suggest some ways that listeners can make a difference. What advice can you give them to be an agent for change?
Nicole Baker (19:14): I get asked this question a lot and I always give the same answer, so I apologize if people have already heard this in other interviews or podcasts. But basically what I like to say is to be an informed consumer, you need to know where your stuff comes from, what it's manufactured out of, and you need to vote with your dollars. So you need to buy things that are made out of recycled plastic, which then creates demand for that, which makes it worthwhile for me to even bother collecting this stuff in the first place. And if all of a sudden everybody went to the grocery store and refused to buy any cleaning products that were not packaged in containers that were made out of recycled plastic, the companies would stop making them because it wouldn't be something that they could sell or make a profit out of.
(20:06): And so a lot of people think, well, I'm just one person, I can't do anything. But if all those one people did the same thing, we could really make a lot of change. And so I would say this is not just about recycling, but if you want, let's say your meat to be sourced in a more sustainable way, you need to be buying meat that's sourced in the way that you want, or fish or all kinds of different products that we consume in our daily lives. Be informed about where that stuff comes from. You should see me in the aisles of the grocery store reading the backs of labels and taking hours to do my shopping, but I really feel like that's important and can it make a difference.
Pamela Ferris-Olson (20:47): Great advice. Finally Nicole, are there ways that listeners might help you? Maybe they'd like to know how to purchase rope or have a connection that might be interested in selling or buying used rope, or maybe they want to invest in Net Your Problem?
Nicole Baker (21:04): Yeah. We have all this information on our website or on our social media. There's profiles at the bottom of our website for each of our representatives. So I live in Seattle, I'm in charge of Alaska and the Pacific Northwest. Sarah lives in San Diego, so she's in charge of collecting gear from squid and two non-anchovy fisherman down there. And then Briani is in Maine and Caitlin is in Massachusetts. So depending on where you live, you can contact one of the regional representatives. The rope depot is in Maine. You can also purchase stuff that I have in my warehouse here in Seattle and similarly when we get our Massachusetts warehouse up and running. But I encourage you to reach out to your closest regional representative and we can figure out how to get you plugged into what we're working on.
Pamela Ferris-Olson (21:59): I will put your internet address up on my website, but you should tell people now so they can hear it, what your web address is.
Nicole Baker (22:10): Sure. It's www.netyourproblem.com, and that's how you can find us on all of the social medias too. Twitter, I'm not sure what's happening with Twitter these days. Instagram, LinkedIn. I'm personally on LinkedIn @Nicole Baker. But Net Your Problem also has a page and we're also @Net Your Problem on Facebook.
Pamela Ferris-Olson (22:33): Wonderful. So Nicole, I appreciate your interest on being on the Women Mind the Water Artivist Series podcast. I hope listeners have gained greater awareness on commercial fishing, creative solutions, and the role dedicated women can have in making a difference. I'd like to remind listeners that I've been speaking with Nicole Baker in the Women Mind the Water Artivist Series podcast. This series can be viewed on womenmindthewater.com, museum on Main Street and YouTube. An audio only version of this podcast is available on womenmindthewater.com on iTunes and Spotify. Women Mind The Water is Grateful to Jane Rice for the use of her song, Women of Water. All Rights for the Women Mind the water name and logo belong to Pam Ferris-Olson. This is Pam Ferris-Olson.
