3R-Fish

Pilot: lighting artifacts

 

Battery collection

The problem of waste batteries and fishing activities are confined mainly to a specific fleet type, the longline fleet, which aims to species such as swordfish, cod and sharks. Fishing for these species are used artificial lights, battery-powered, emit light that attracts fish. Given the size of their fishing operations, thousands of batteries used in each campaign, resulting in large amounts of waste of this type.

Therefore, the Pilot of lighting devices is core to those ports where this type of fleet concentrated and where the target residue is present in most. In this case, the ports where they initially place the project activities are Burela and Vigo, significant fleet home ports of these characteristics.

Battery collection at the port of Burela

For the management of waste batteries, the consortium worked with ECOPILAS (Foundation for Environmental Management of Stacks), an organization promoted by the industry itself Manufacturers of batteries based on the principle of producer co- in the final management of waste materials from their products.

After the negotiation and signing of an agreement by which ECOPILAS be responsible for the collection, storage, transport and waste management of batteries in the harbors of the project began with the collection of waste batteries in Vigo and Burela in September 2009, after adding other ports as A Coruña and Marin to it. The batteries collected in the Pilot are sent to a treatment center where he made the recovery of heavy metals that make up the batteries.

During the pilot, also proceeded to equip participants container ports for large-scale batteries and to deliver some ships collaborating small containers to keep on board and so collect batteries and at home in suitable containers thus facilitating the process.

Study fishing lights

The generation of batteries, as explained above, is associated with the use by the fishing fleet of artificial lights, used in fishing operations in order to attract fish to their gear. These lights, of which there are many models on the market, suitable both for industrial fishing to sport fishing, are made of plastic and are fed by one or more cells to generate light via LEDs . Longline vessels use thousands of these lights in their operations, of which a relatively high percentage break and lost at sea during the fishing years.

Outline of the elements of a type fishing light

 

The objective of this part of the project is the analysis of several of the most common models of fishing lights used by the fleet in order to know little studied aspects such as environmental performance, resource consumption, the wear and tear and efficiency, both fishing and ecological. The ultimate goal is to make recommendations for the design of future models based on these factors, minimizing environmental impact.

Sailor preparing fishing lights aboard a longline vessel

 

For this purpose, and with the collaboration of an association of owners of longlining (ABSA, SA Burela Shipowners), we proceeded to the choice of several models of light, of which samples were delivered for use on board further study. The tests that are subject to these fishing lights are divided into three types:

• Materials Testing: Identification of materials that are composed.
• Electric and hydrostatic tests: Study of power consumption, durability, sealing, etc.
• Optical testing: Studies of light distribution, light output, etc.

These lights will be studied also in various stages of use, in order to check the degree of degradation over time of these lights, and to study how it affects the degradation of the parameters analyzed.