Irish Examiner view: At last, EU moves to protect oceans

New rules deal with fishing gear placed on the market and waste fishing gear collected

Waste lobster pots being pulled out from the seabed in Galway.

Leo Baekeland invented the first fully synthetic plastic in New York in 1907. He called the material Bakelite and offered the term ‘plastics’ to the world. He cannot have imagined how ubiquitous plastics would become. Neither could he have imagined even a fraction of the myriad positive applications of the material. No one alive just over a century ago could have imagined that discarded plastics would become such a toxic blight, polluting waterways and oceans, snaring animals, birds, and fish for the decades between the moment they are dumped and eventually disintegrate.

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The European Commission yesterday moved to address that crisis and ruled on procedures to deal with fishing gear placed on the market and waste fishing gear collected. The pressing objective is to cut dangerous marine litter. To do this, European Green Deal leader Frans Timmermans said: “The EU’s rules are a landmark achievement... This is what the Green Deal is all about — protecting and restoring our natural environment while stimulating businesses to innovate.” That plastic waste keeps on accumulating, and 11 000 tonnes of fishing gear are lost or discarded in EU seas each year shows how necessary these measures are.

As the recent trawler protest in Cork showed, EU fishery policies are contentious but no one who cares for our seas and sustainable commercial fishing can object to measures designed to reduce the awful impact of plastic waste in our seas.