Opportunities and challenges in reducing abandoned, lost, or discarded fishing gear: Lessons from Taiwan

With oceans projected to carry more plastic pollution in volume than fish by 2050, various countries have stepped up clean-up, mitigation, and prevention efforts. Abandoned, lost, and/or discarded fishing gear (ALDFG), which causes ghost fishing and other environmental harm, has been one of the most abundant and problematic types of plastic pollution to marine environments to date. One way to combat ALDFG is to develop a circular economy for marine plastics, and this study focuses on one world leader in this effort: Taiwan. By "following the plastic" through the circular economy, this study examines the effectiveness of Taiwan's state initiatives. Overall, this study finds that while the Taiwanese state has been responsive to civil society lobbying and includes extensive policies to mitigate and prevent ALDFG, current policies fail to include market linkages and incentives for recycling companies and businesses. This has caused bottlenecks in the movement of ALDFG through the circular economy system, namely in the costly, labor-intensive phases of sorting and cleaning retrieved ALDFG, ultimately preventing Taiwan from closing the circular economy loop.