By Larry Pynn.
Removing abandoned infrastructure is challenging, time-consuming, and costly.
Aquaculture is big business in Canada. In 2023, open-net-pen salmon farming in British Columbia alone produced 50,000 tonnes of fish worth just over US $350-million. But on June 30, 2029, the federal government’s long-looming ban on open-net-pen salmon farming is set to take effect. On that day, 63 operations will be forced to shut down.
For decades, BC’s open-net-pen salmon farmers have faced criticism that their activities are harming the environment by promoting the spread of disease and fostering parasitic sea lice that can infect wild salmon. But closing a salmon or other kind of marine farm isn’t as simple as letting a field lie fallow.
Whether degraded by poor maintenance, battered by heavy storms, or beset by financial woes, aquaculture operations have gone under before—sometimes literally. And when they do, derelict equipment can find its way to the seafloor or become suspended in the water column.
“It’s pretty devastating,” says Ben Boulton, the program manager of British Columbia’s Rugged Coast Research Society, a charity that works with the provincial government and First Nations to clean up marine debris specifically from shellfish farms. These efforts have often involved smaller mom-and-pop oyster operations that lost gear to the ocean floor years or decades ago.
“You come upon a mound of gear that is seemingly infinite—a huge mess everywhere you look,” he says. Abandoned nets, ropes, buoys, concrete blocks, plastic buckets and trays, PVC pipes, generators, steel anchors, iron rebar, floats, gangways, docks, drums, tires, and polystyrene foam can all linger, threatening the marine environment.
During one disturbing stint at a derelict operation on northern Vancouver Island, for instance, workers with the nonprofit Ocean Legacy Foundation found that a group of river otters had started building dens inside the polystyrene foam from decaying floats and were eating the marine life growing on it.
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