I Live By The North Sea. It's Full of Rope.

Every time I walk the beach up here, I find rope.

Not the nice stuff. Frayed orange line wrapped round a bit of driftwood. A knot of blue polypropylene half buried in the sand. Once a lump of net about the size of a car tyre, stiff with salt and grit and God knows what else.

I live in Aberdeen. The North Sea is basically my back garden. And my back garden is full of rope.

What happens to old rope when nobody is watching

Here is the bit that did my head in when I actually looked it up.

Somewhere between 500,000 and a million tonnes of fishing gear goes into the world's oceans every single year. Nets, lines, rope. That is roughly a tenth of everything floating out there.

In the North East Atlantic alone, around 25,000 ghost nets are lost or dumped each year. Laid end to end that is up to 1,250 km of netting. Every year. Just sitting in the water, still doing the job it was designed to do, catching things nobody is coming back for.

And it does not rot away. Nylon takes hundreds of years to break down. It just gets smaller and smaller until it is small enough for something to swallow.

Climbing rope is not fishing rope. It is still nylon.

Right, let me be honest with you, because I am not going to sit here and pretend I am cleaning up the North Sea. I am not. I make belts in a wee workshop in Aberdeen. That is the whole operation.

Marine rope is not something I can take in either. It comes back covered in salt, oil and barnacles and it needs proper industrial kit to deal with. Way past a fella with a workbench and a hot knife.

But it is the same material. Nylon. Built to be brilliant for a few years and then a problem for a few hundred.

Climbing ropes retire after five to ten years even when they look perfect, because the core wears out where you cannot see it. The wall takes it off the shelf and it is done. One rope costs around 46 kg of CO2 to make, and then it goes in a skip.

That is the bit that actually gets me. Not the drone footage of a turtle in a net. The skip round the back of a climbing wall in Scotland, on a Tuesday, with nobody watching.

What I can actually do about it

Walls around the UK now put their retired rope in a bag for me instead of the bin. In January alone that was over 5 km of rope that never made it to landfill.

Then it gets a second job. A recycled climbing rope belt made to your exact waist, anywhere from 22 inches to 50. A rope and cork coaster sat under your brew. A rope keychain from a fiver that will outlast the keys on it.

It is not charity and it is not a save the planet badge. It is one man deciding that a rope which already did something serious deserves better than a landfill.

Five kilometres is nothing next to 1,250 km of ghost net. I know that. But I would rather do the small thing properly than do the big thing in a caption.

And if you have got a dead rope sat in a cupboard doing nothing, send it my way. It is far more useful here than it is in there.

Next time you are on a beach, have a look at the tideline. You will start seeing it everywhere. Sorry about that.

Stay classy and remember,
Make Waste Useful.

George