GGGI Small Grant (2023) - Tangaroa Blue Foundation (Australia)

Dec 31

Tangaroa Blue Whitsunday Island - Project ReCon deployment

Project Summary

Project ReCon: Great Barrier Reef & Cape York, Australia

In an Australian first, Project ReCon was launched in December 2022 along the Great Barrier Reef to provide communities with a way of contributing to an ALDFG recovery, repair, reuse, and recycling project. Through the GGGI Small Grants Program, Tangaroa Blue will expand their initial trail and extend Project ReCon to enable participation of additional communities along the Great Barrier Reef, the Torres Strait Islands, and the Gulf of Carpentaria.

International commercial fishing buoys are regularly found by Tangaroa Blue and their Australian Marine Debris Initiative (AMDI) partners during beach clean-up events, particularly in northern Australia, but no way to reuse them or recycle them had previously been identified. This collaboration between Tangaroa Blue and Satlink allows official ownership to be transferred from the commercial fishing company who owns the buoy to Tangaroa Blue for Project ReCon. After structural and software testing has been completed, the buoys are distributed to Tangaroa Blue and AMDI partners to host on their vessels. In the event that the vessel comes across ALDFG that they can't remove because of the vessel size and crew capacity, the buoy can be immediately attached to it to allow tracking to occur while a recovery response is coordinated, preventing it from drifting away and becoming lost.

Already 40 buoys have been re-distributed to partners and 3 deployments have taken place resulting in the removal of over 6 tonnes of ALDFG. In addition, more than 100 buoys have been donated to the program by community members along the Great Barrier Reef and a recycling program is currently being designed to recycle the buoys that are unable to be used in Project ReCon, diverting this marine e-waste from landfill.