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Lobstermen call it pot warp: the rope that runs from the buoy on the water’s surface down to the trap on the ocean floor.
A single lobsterman may use miles of it. Until the mid-20th century, pot warp was made of natural fiber — Manila, cotton, hemp — that wore out, broke down and eventually was burned or left to biodegrade.
Then synthetic rope replaced it almost entirely, adopted for its strength, durability and low cost. The rope must be replaced regularly because the plastics involved degrade with use and exposure, and no lobsterman wants to risk losing traps, or lobsters, to a snapped line.
For generations, old pot warp, natural or synthetic, was often tossed overboard or burned. But while natural fiber rope biodegrades eventually, plastic rope does not. It breaks down into microplastics, and if burned in an open fire, produces what Matinicus Island resident Eva Murray calls a “revolting black oily fire” and leaves behind multicolored goo on the rocks.
Nobody in the waste industry wants it either. Fed into mechanized equipment, the plastic rope twists around shafts and conveyor belts, forces shutdowns and requires workers to cut it free by hand. Old rope as a result piles up under wharves and behind fish houses when it’s pulled out of service.
Murray arrived on Matinicus in 1987 to teach school for a year and never left. She has served as its town clerk, treasurer, administrative assistant and, as she puts it, garbage czar. Over 23 years, she and others have built a recycling and solid waste program from nothing on an island with no loading dock, no tractor-trailer access and a ferry schedule that governs everything: The boat departs only once to five times per month, varying by season.
Today, it all moves by truck and ferry to a transfer station on the mainland. Though run by volunteers, it is an actual municipal department, funded by property taxes, like every other town in Maine is required to have. But one thing Matinicus is still figuring out how to throw away is its pot warp, and there’s plenty of it on the island, where lobstering remains essentially the only local industry.
So when nearly 5 tons of accumulated lobstermen’s rope finally left Matinicus on April 23 on a rented truck bound for a warehouse in New Bedford, Massachusetts, it was both a local success, if a limited one, and an illustration of a problem that runs the length of the Maine coast.
In the absence of a statewide system for disposing of end-of-life fishing gear, the solution and the cost fall on affected communities often with limited or no resources. The trip was for demonstration as much as disposal, intended to show what it takes to move old gear off a remote island, and to argue that Maine needs something like what New Bedford has: a dedicated warehouse to receive, sort and process marine debris from across the region.
“This is not going to be our routine solid waste mechanism unless somebody with deep pockets wants to help,” Murray said.
It was not Murray’s first attempt at a solution for getting rid of the old rope. At the Maine Resource Recovery Association’s annual conference in 2017 — “dump school,” she calls it — she met Hank Lang, the plant manager at Penobscot Energy Recovery, a trash-to-energy facility in Orrington. PERC had recently acquired a machine called the Terminator, designed to shred materials too difficult for conventional equipment, and Lang was looking for something to test it on.
“I said, ‘Boy, have I got a difficult material for you,'” Murray recalled. “He said, ‘What have you got?’ I said, ‘A lot of plastic rope. A lot.'”
Lang offered to take the first truckload for free. Over three years, from 2018 to 2021, Murray made nine trips — hauling rope in U-Hauls or borrowed dump trucks, with volunteers on the island pitching it in by hand. She hauled more than 35 tons in all. Then PERC went out of business, changed ownership and the facility caught fire. Whether the Terminator survived the blaze, Murray cannot determine. She was left holding the rope, and the pile that she and other volunteers had been steadily reducing began to grow again.
Murray spent several years attending Fishermen’s Forum and writing letters in support of grant applications by a regional coalition of nonprofits working on the marine debris problem.
Among them were the Center for Coastal Studies, the Rozalia Project and Net Your Problem, a nonprofit with a 4,000-square-foot warehouse in New Bedford where discarded fishing rope is collected and sorted. The higher-quality and more colorful rope is sold to artists who use it to make doormats, baskets and sculptures, while the more degraded rope is shredded for concrete aggregate or shipped all the way to Denmark to a recycling plant.
The coalition agreed to cover the costs for Murray to haul a load of Matinicus rope to New Bedford. The original plan was to make the trip in October 2025, but the weather did not cooperate. The trip was rescheduled for December, but the weather failed to cooperate again. The pile sat through the winter until this spring, when the forecast, the tides and the ferry schedule all finally aligned.
Undertaking such a project on the island is, as Murray put it, a three-ring circus of logistics.
Given the infrequent ferry schedule, ordinary vehicle reservations can be made up to three months in advance, yet even the special four-month window available to Matinicus Island Recycling and Solid Waste doesn’t guarantee a truck spot, as they fill quickly. The island’s wharf is inaccessible at low tide, and even at high tide it is not big-truck friendly, as the steep, narrow ramp also features a hairpin turn. The loading window is roughly an hour before the ferry departs. If you miss it, the next one could be a week away or longer, depending on the weather and calendar.
For the April trip, a skid steer one of the islanders happened to own, fitted with a grapple — steel jaws that could seize a mass of tangled rope and hoist it into the truck’s box — made the loading considerably faster than on prior trips. Even so, the people inside the truck still had to pitch the rope forward by hand for about four hours. When Murray weighed the truck at certified scales on the way south, it came to nearly five tons.
“We could easily haul off multiple truckloads a year,” she said, “if somebody would take it.”
The total cost of the trip: about $3,000 in truck rental, ferry fare, fuel and hotels, covered by coalition grants — and that figure includes a detour to Fairfield, on the far side of Waterville, the only rental outlet in the region she could find with a truck of sufficient capacity. “That doesn’t count my time or anybody else’s time,” Murray said.
The artists who came to help unload the rope in New Bedford on April 24 were delighted with what they found. Kim Edwards, a fiber artist from Westerly, Rhode Island, who makes baskets and other creations from discarded fishing gear, had been waiting since the previous fall, when the trip was first delayed by weather.
“I just pulled this right here which has lavender and this pink,” she told CAI, the local NPR affiliate, which covered the unloading. “So right now it looks very dirty and once you wash it all these bright beautiful colors come out.”
Nicole Baker, the founder of Net Your Problem, told CAI that Maine’s rope is distinctively more colorful than what comes off Massachusetts boats. The prettier rope was priced at 75 cents a pound for artists. As for the rest, Baker told CAI, shipping it to a recycling plant in Denmark is “actually cheaper and lower carbon emissions” than domestic alternatives because most U.S. recycling facilities are not equipped to handle it.
“These people were really pleased to have it,” Murray said, “so that sort of took the edge off the fact that the bill was rather large to do this.”
Yet Murray is quick to say that it was a demonstration, not a solution, and not practically repeatable. “There is no cost-effective way to make this stuff go away,” she said. She estimates close to twice as much rope remains in the pile on the island, which will only continue to grow. Future trips depend on whether the coalition can secure continued funding; Matinicus Island Recycling and Solid Waste cannot finance the truck rental and associated costs.
Murray says she would do it again if the funding materialized. The coalition’s marine debris grant has already funded one small step — a $600 pallet jack that would simplify future loading — but that’s the extent of the funding for now.
Still, the demonstration served a purpose.
“It’s to show people how hard it is,” said Laura Ludwig of the Center for Coastal Studies. “People don’t understand the scale of the problem. Fishermen have many, many more thousands of pounds of rope than that in their backyards.”
Murray does not blame the fishermen.
“They don’t have the alternative of natural fiber rope,” she said, as it is no longer made at the scale or price that commercial fishing requires. Murray calls for product stewardship, or extended producer responsibility, or whatever you want to call it — modest fees collected at the point of sale for commercial fishing gear, similar to those already in place for paint and car batteries — that would help cover disposal costs on the other end.
Maine has no warehouse like the one in New Bedford where fishing communities up and down the coast can bring accumulated gear in quantity. But if the most remote community in Maine — where the logistics are most challenging and the options most limited — is willing to work hard to dispose of it properly, Murray said that other, larger communities have no excuse not to try.
“If we can prevent this rope from being thrown overboard and ending up being speck-sized marine debris that things eat and then starve to death,” she said, “then morally that’s a good thing.”
This story appears through a media partnership with Midcoast Villager.