Sexy Plastic: Why We Turn Down (Almost) Every Request for Our Ghost Nets

A few times a month, we get some version of the same email. A student project, a startup, sometimes an established brand, all asking the same thing: can we have your ghost nets, so we can turn them into something we can sell?

The answer is almost always no. Here is the reasoning, laid out honestly, for the people asking and for the people buying.

The math nobody runs

MCP and our partners logs around 25000 scuba dives a year. Divers are in the water constantly, not hunting for nets specifically, but with standing instructions to report any they see so a team can go retrieve it.

In a typical year, that effort turns up maybe half a dozen ghost nets. Total weight, a few hundred kilos, half a ton at most. And that is before the lead sinkers and the marine growth that has colonized the net by the time we find it get stripped away. Once that is gone, the actual reclaimable plastic is maybe a third to half of the gross weight.

So: 25,000 dives, half a dozen nets, a few hundred kilos of raw material at best. That is what it actually costs, in effort, to retrieve a few ghost nets from nearshore coral reefs.

“Sexy plastic”

Now compare that to the volume of product on the market claiming to be made from reclaimed ocean nets. Sunglasses, carpet tile, skateboards, swimwear, the list keeps growing. We cannot audit anyone’s supply chain, and we are not accusing any specific company of lying. But when you run the numbers on what divers actually pull out of the water each year against what is being sold as “made from ghost nets,” the two are very hard to reconcile.

To be fair to the industry, our skepticism has to be aimed carefully. The nets we retrieve by diving are not the main supply for products marketed this way. Most of that material comes from a different, larger source: fishers voluntarily turning in worn-out nets before they are ever lost, through organised community collection programs rather than divers finding them tangled on a reef. One such program has run in the Philippines since 2012, collecting nets from villages around Danajon Bank and Bantayan, and by the manufacturer’s own figures has fed hundreds of tonnes of net material into a regenerated-nylon supply chain over the past decade. That is a real, physical, if modest, supply.

So the honest version of our suspicion is more precise than “the math never adds up.” It is: be careful which story you are being sold. A brand implying its material comes from divers pulling ghost nets off a coral reef, evocative, cinematic, and rarely true at any real volume, is making a different claim from a brand sourcing through a community net take-back scheme, which is real, if far less dramatic than the marketing photos suggest. This is not a new observation either. Sustainability trade press was raising exactly this question about this exact Philippine program back in 2013, asking whether shipping baled nets from Danajon Bank to a processing plant in Europe, then finished yarn onward to a carpet factory somewhere else again, actually delivers the environmental win the story implies.

Plastic is just plastic

Here is the part we think gets lost entirely in this conversation: there is nothing chemically or physically special about plastic that came out of a turtle’s nose, off a beach, or out of a ghost net, compared to plastic that came out of a normal recycling bin. It is raw material, full stop. Our own collection teams retrieve 100+ tonnes a year of garbage from beaches, but it is not shipped anywhere. It is recycled locally, and presumably bought by manufactures without any knowledge of any ocean origin.

But to ship an actual ghost net for the material, to re-use this particular piece of plastic, someone has to locate it, retrieve it, often at real cost and (for scuba divers) real risk, ship it to a recycling facility, then ship the recycled material again to wherever the product is actually made. Every one of those extra steps carries a carbon and logistics cost that a factory sourcing ordinary recycled plastic locally simply does not pay.

We will grant one complication to our own argument here. If the honest alternative to reclaimed nylon was virgin, oil-derived nylon rather than conveniently local recycled stock, the claimed lifecycle benefit, up to 90 percent lower carbon impact than virgin material, may hold up, and the extra shipping may still net out ahead. We have not independently verified that figure, and we would want to see it properly audited before repeating it as settled fact. But notice what that does to our argument. It does not rescue the marketing. It just means the honest version of our point is not “this material traveled further than necessary, so it is automatically worse for the planet.” It is “this material is not chemically special, so paying a premium for its backstory buys you a story, not a superior product.” That claim holds regardless of the shipping math, and it is the one we actually stand behind.

What you are actually buying

So why does this market exist? Because “made from reclaimed ocean plastic” is a story, and a really good one. One that commands a premium! It manufactures scarcity, since there is only so much ocean plastic to go around. It flatters the buyer’s self-image, the kind of person who buys ocean plastic. And it lets a company charge solidly for material that, chemically is identical to any other plastic they source in a more environmentally friendly fashion.

At its most defensible, the premium consumers pay is not paying for better plastic. It is paying to fund the collection behavior itself, giving a fisher a real reason to bring a worn net to a community bank instead of leaving it on a reef or dumping it at sea. That is a legitimate thing to pay for, in the same way a Fair Trade premium does not change how coffee tastes but does change how the people who grew it are paid. Done honestly, with transparent accounting of where the money goes and verifiable percentages of actual reclaimed material in the finished product, that model deserves support, and some programs genuinely run it that way.

The trouble is that individual consumer, the buyer, generally cannot tell which one you are looking at from the packaging alone. “Made from ocean plastic” and “made from ocean-bound plastic” get used interchangeably in marketing despite meaning very different things: one is material physically recovered from the sea, the other is material collected on land before it had the chance to reach it. Almost nothing on a label is required to say how much of either is actually in the product, or where it came from. That ambiguity is not an accident. It is the business model. (How many months in a year has twenty eight days in them? The answer is all of them – just, eleven of them also happen to have more than 28 days in them. The point is, a small fraction of ocean plastics still makes a tricky, but valid claim that something is “made of ocean plastic.”)

In any case, none of this requires the product to actually help the ocean. It just requires the buyer to believe it does, and buyers are very willing to connect dots that were never really there.

So, no. But also, maybe.

If you want our ghost nets to build a product line, we cannot help you, and we would gently encourage you to ask harder questions of whoever is currently supplying you.

If you are doing genuine academic research, something that actually advances ocean conservation rather than a retail product, we are glad to talk. That is a different conversation, and one we are always happy to have.

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