Plastic in the water is cutting into the pay of Vietnam’s small-scale fishers, the study finds, costing an average of $3,421 per vessel annually and reducing vessel owners’ earnings by about 10 to 25 percent. Researchers connect those losses to extra hours away from productive fishing, lower catch efficiency when nets haul debris, and repeated damage to gear that requires repair or replacement.
Interviewed crews describe routine encounters with a wide range of litter. Single-use food packaging and bottles turn up alongside feed sacks from aquaculture, and fragments of nylon rope and torn netting become entwined in gear. Those materials do more than foul a single haul, they cut the profitability of each day at sea by increasing handling time and the risk that a trip will return little marketable catch.
Fishing teams report adapting by hauling more often to try to sustain returns. One interviewee said, "Before, 6-7 hauls were enough [to turn a profit]. Now it takes 20-25 hauls." That shift raises fuel and labour bills and, according to the study, intensifies pressure on fish populations that are already heavily exploited.
The research highlights practical responses that work where full clean-up is impractical. It points to "fishing for litter" schemes that pay modest sums to crews who bring plastic bycatch back to shore for proper disposal and processing. Those programs are designed both to remove debris from the marine environment and to compensate fishers for the extra time and handling that dealing with plastic requires.
Michel Kaiser, a professor of fisheries conservation at Heriot-Watt University and a study co-author, said, "When you see firsthand the sheer volume of [plastic waste] in Southeast Asia, and how it directly impacts people’s lives and livelihoods, it crystallizes very clearly why we need to address this." He added that stopping plastic at its source is a fundamental part of any solution.
The study frames a twofold approach: reduce the flow of plastic into the ocean, and deploy incentives so fishers can cover the immediate costs of collecting and returning debris. Combining upstream measures with on-water compensation is presented as a way to protect livelihoods and marine stocks, while easing the daily burden plastic places on coastal fishing communities.
