Fish­ing waste with an app

Fish­er­men spend a lot of time at sea. That sim­ple obser­va­tion is the key to address­ing one of the great­est prob­lems of our time: waste in our oceans. Specif­i­cal­ly, the inter­na­tion­al project Fish­ing for Lit­ter encour­ages fish­er­men to (also) col­lect waste and bring it ashore in big bags, where it can be recycled.

That sounds great, but it required prac­ti­cal organ­i­sa­tion. ​“First and fore­most, the De Red­er­scen­trale (shipown­ers’ cen­tre) and oth­er fish­er­men par­tic­i­pat­ing in the project, need­ed a tool that made it easy to reg­is­ter how much waste was being fished,” says Andries De Reyghere, founder and man­ag­ing part­ner at Bits of Love. ​“At their request, we devel­oped an app in which all the nec­es­sary data can be entered very eas­i­ly: the quan­ti­ty of bags, where they are brought ashore, where the waste was col­lect­ed and by whom… Until now, all of this was col­lect­ed man­u­al­ly and threat­ened to become a hassle.”

Basic and time-saving

Sea fish­ing is inten­sive. Under no cir­cum­stances should the app affect dai­ly activ­i­ties. Andries De Reyghere: ​“That was the cus­tomer’s main require­ment: sim­ple data entry for the fish­er­men, who are the end-users of the app. That is why we main­ly rea­soned from their point of view and reduced the reg­is­tra­tion process of a big bag to its pure essence. The result: a basic, but very smooth and time-sav­ing app that does what it’s sup­posed to do, with­out dis­trac­tions or unnec­es­sary functionalities.”

An addi­tion­al advan­tage: the cus­tomer gains insight into the data in a struc­tured and clear man­ner. ​“Because the infor­ma­tion is also pub­lic, De Red­er­scen­trale can fur­ther raise aware­ness about ​‘Fish­ing for Lit­ter’ and high­light the con­tri­bu­tion of the fish­ing indus­try”, con­cludes Andries.