University of Georgia Marine Extension and Georgia Sea Grant have come up with a creative way to clean up the Georgian coast and providing financial support to local commercial shrimpers whose income was limited during the pandemic.

Through Trawl to Trash, funded by the National Sea Grant College Program, commercial shrimpers are recruited to sew upcycled shrimp net bags that can be used to collect marine debris.

“It’s exciting to find a new purpose for these trawls and who better to make the bags than the shrimpers who have spent countless hours fixing their nets ahead of the shrimp season?” said Dodie Sanders, marine educator at Marine Extension and Georgia Sea Grant, and project manager Trawl to Trash.

The shrimpers earn $20 for every bag they sew.

A fisherman, Jonathan Bennett, used the money he earned from the nets to pay the people who worked for him.

“It was extra money, it helped us,” said Bennett, a fifth-generation commercial shrimper from Brunswick who now captains his own boat, the Flying Cloud. Bennett has been fishing shrimp since he was 4 years old. His grandfather taught him how to fix shrimp nets.

“For years I was the only man on the boat who knew how to sew, so I got pretty good at it,” he said. He and his grandfather, who is still a shrimper, joined the Trawl to Trash project during the off season when their boat was being repaired.

(Photo courtesy of Marine Extension and Georgia Sea Grant)

In an effort to produce more bags for outreach efforts, Sanders partnered with the South Carolina Sea Grant Consortium to recruit additional shrimpers into the program. As of January 2022, 15 shrimpers from Georgia and South Carolina had earned a total of $30,700 for 1,535 bags.

“This opportunity came at a good time, as shrimpers bag between the peak of the brown shrimp season and the white shrimp season, when landings and revenues are lower than the rest of the world. year,” said Graham Gaines, living marine resources program specialist at the South Carolina Sea Grant Consortium and project partner.

With more than a thousand bags in hand, Sanders and other educators at UGA’s marine education center and aquarium on Skidaway Island worked to distribute them to the public through programs. educational and community science endeavors.

“We educate and engage ecotourism guides, students, boaters, beachgoers and others who can make a difference in mitigating the impacts of marine debris,” Sanders said.

As part of their outreach efforts, the team has launched a Community Marine Debris Science Program, which engages volunteers to clear marine debris from barrier islands and salt marshes along the Georgian coast while monitoring this which they collect using the Marine Debris Tracker app.

Since April 2021, community scientists involved in the program have carried out more than 25 marine debris cleanups at three sites on the Georgian coast and collected thousands of artifacts.

They also work with ecotourism guides who have been certified by Marine Extension and Georgia Sea Grant’s Coastal Awareness and Responsible Ecotourism program. Guides provide bags for their clients and encourage them to pick up debris while exploring Georgia’s beaches and barrier islands.

This summer, educators will deliver hands-on after-school programs at Boys’ and Girls’ Clubs in Chatham and Glynn Counties, educating the next generation about marine debris and encouraging them to make a difference by using Trawl to Trash bags to clean up their communities. .

“These efforts illustrate and reinforce the importance of building community capacity and encouraging behavior change as a way to support long-term prevention of marine debris,” Sanders said.