“The main problem is the pollution. There’s a layer of black, toxic mud, sometimes up to 30 centimetres thick on the seabed off the coast. You drop the nets into this stuff and they come up black and empty, and stinking horribly. Nothing is living down there.”
While this dead zone may be void of fish, the fishing nets cast there don’t always come up empty. “Sometimes, we haul up plastic, lots and lots of plastic,” said Costa, describing massive deposits of plastic debris that have accumulated on the sea floor, and banks of garbage constantly swept here and there by changing currents.
Sometimes the banks of plastic can stretch for kilometres and be three or four hundred metres wide. “The plastic ruins the nets. It gets caught in the knots of the net and you basically end up with a wall, not a net,” said Costa. “It’s impossible to clean or repair the nets when this happens. You have to throw them out.”
A new net costs around €3,000. During 2008, each boat of Badalona’s fishing fleet was forced to replace two or three nets because of plastic. In January 2009, all nets had to be replaced again after a particularly nasty encounter with a submerged bank of trash. Most of the plastic junk either enters the sea as rubbish left behind on beaches, is dumped deliberately into the sea or is spewed there by sewage overflow after a heavy rain.
“Years ago, we used to welcome a storm,” explained Ramón Costa. “The overflow from rivers, streams and sewage brought nutrients into the sea, which the fish would come and eat. But now, forget about it. At this point, we don’t even bother going out after a storm. It’s not worth it. There’s too much plastic, tampon after tampon, and no fish.”
Among other things, Costa blames the new water-treatment plant at the mouth of the Besòs River for aggravating the sea’s ills. The plant chemically treats the water entering the sea, killing any living organisms that might serve as food for the fish. Historically, the plant is also responsible for the toxic sludge that currently blankets the seabed off the coast of Barcelona and Badalona.
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