CLOCKWORK FILMS, SAMSUNG & CNN CREATE RAISE AWARENESS ABOUT OCEAN WASTE & DERELICT FISHING GEAR, A.KA. “GHOST GEAR”. THEY DAMAGE DELICATE ECOSYSTEMS CAUSING KNOCK-ON EFFECTS FURTHER ALONG THE FOOD CHAIN AND HAS CREATED AN ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUE THAT’S SEEN EXPONENTIAL GROWTH FOR DECADES.
In July 2022, Clockwork Films was privileged to be asked to be part of creating a campaign with great kaupapa. The project was a collaboration between Samsung, CNN/Create, Ghost Divers NZ and Clockwork – and involved us ‘Diving for Ghosts’ in Wellington Harbour to retrieve discarded fishing and industrial waste from the harbour. Over two days we removed over 2 tons of waste, and with the help of a crack production crew, we were able to capture the essence of it with director Dan Buyanovsky.
Truck tires, street cones, car batteries, live ammunition, and industrial-scale fishing nets; it’s not what you’d expect to find at the bottom of the ocean. But this is just a sample of what Rob Wilson and his team at Ghost Diving New Zealand retrieve from the waters surrounding Wellington in their monthly cleanup missions.
Ridding the oceans of waste is a global challenge that requires collaboration; this is where community-driven volunteer teams like Ghost Diving New Zealand are essential. Wilson and his team emphasise marine education and conservation, organising cleanup missions and rescuing wildlife. Around 65% of New Zealanders live within five kilometres of the sea, while the marine economy employs over 30,000 people. So, managing the water around this island nation is vitally important. His team’s progress has buoyed Wilson since Ghost Diving New Zealand launched in 2015.
“The fight against ocean pollution is a David and Goliath scenario. But we are not just going to sit there and let it happen? Just the rubbish that we’ve removed from our local harbour is having a dramatic improvement on the amount of sea life we’re seeing,” says Wilson. “I think we’d see a much bigger impact on a global scale if more people got stuck in and tried to make a difference in their own local environments.”
Real change will require input from big corporations that can use their scale in the fight to combat marine pollution. Samsung Electronics, a major corporate driver of sustainable technology, is steering the conversation toward better solutions for recovered fishing nets. According to the company’s proprietary research, by the end of 2022, their use of recycled ocean-bound material could prevent more than 50 tons of discarded fishing nets from entering the world’s oceans. Based on the concept of “purposeful innovation”, it is repurposing these ocean-bound plastics for use in its technologies.
The alternative has unfathomable consequences. Currently, only 10% of plastic is recycled worldwide; the rest ends up in landfills and the oceans, with 290,000 tons floating on the ocean’s surface. There are also estimated to be 5.25 trillion pieces of macro and microplastics in the oceans, taking millennia to decompose, and are found in one-third of fish caught for human consumption.
And with plastics killing approximately 1 million seabirds and 100,000 marine animals every year, big solutions are needed.
