Trelleborg materials are renowned for their presence in a huge range of technologies and environments worldwide, but sometimes they can be found in the unlikeliest of places that surprise even Trelleborg itself.

Recently, while watching a television news report about removing plastic waste from the oceans, an employee within Trelleborg Industrial Solutions, noticed something familiar: the bright pink lift bags used for the task contained a polyurethane coated fabric that was produced by Trelleborg.

The bags, made by Trelleborg’s customer Halcyon Dive Systems, are used by Greenpeace and others to remove ‘ghost nets’, fishing nets that have been abandoned to drift in the world’s oceans, causing all manner of havoc to sea life.

“I was very surprised when I saw the bags. I had no idea our coated material was being used to help pull up ghost nets in the ocean,” says Steve Brockman, Vice President & Commercial Director for Trelleborg’s engineered coated fabrics, who is proud that Trelleborg can make a contribution to help address what is a growing problem.

In fact, ghost nets have become a bane of the seas. They are left behind after being caught on coral, dropped by fishermen, or just carelessly discarded because they are worn out. But out of sight does not mean they’re gone. The forgotten nets keep drifting in the water like specters in a haunting dance, continuing to do their job, but helping no one or anything. Fish, crabs, turtles and other sea creatures still become caught in these nets, slowly perishing due to starvation or strangulation.

The United Nations Environmental Program (unep) estimates that 640,000 ghost nets are left behind in the sea each year. That amounts to ten percent of the 14 billion pounds (6.3 billion kilograms) of waste that makes its way into the ocean annually, and it accounts for 85 percent of the plastic that makes up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

The Global Ocean Explorers Survey Foundation (goes) warns that the bits of plastic filling the seas are merging with toxic chemicals from sunscreens, fire retardants (pbdes), polychlorinated biphenyls, tin and mercury, bonding together and being mistaken for food by plankton and other inhabitants of the sea.

These poisonous cocktails have already wiped out an enormous amount of the plankton population on Earth, and goes says we have only ten years to correct this death spiral. Plankton eat a significant amount of carbon dioxide and produce an astounding 75 percent of the oxygen generated on Earth. That’s more than the Amazon rainforest.?If all the planet’s plankton are killed off, it spells doom for life on Earth.

“There’s an incredible amount of plastic out there — wherever you look, wherever you go, you’ll find plastic, even in the Arctic,” says Mark Messersmith, Chief Operating Officer of Halcyon Dive Systems. For many years, Halcyon has been providing equipment like the dive bags a Trelleborg employee spotted in the news report to Ghost Fishing teams, who work around the world to dredge discarded nylon nets from the sea.