SULLIVAN, Maine — OceansWide Inc. is a student-focused organization that has teamed up with Sumner Memorial High School to provide students with a unique educational opportunity.
“What we are really looking for is to build their connection with the community, and so something like this where we can partner with an organization where the students actually can go out and be a part of their community," Sarah Hooper, an alternative pathways teacher at Sumner Memorial High School, said.
When Buzz Scott, founder and executive director of OceansWide, decided to provide a solution to the state’s old and unusable lobster traps, he thought to offer local students scuba diving lessons for their willing services.
“We looked around and tried to find somebody that was taking care of these traps and found that it wasn’t really being done,” Scott said.
According to OceansWide, there are over 10 million lobster traps at the bottom of the ocean. To prevent this, OceansWide encourages lobstermen to dispose of their old and unused traps at the Traps2Treasure facility in Gouldsboro, where high school students then process them to be recycled.
“So we take one of our lobster traps that we have over here and we have to take all the plastic bits out of it; the nets, the bags, the ropes, the bungee cords, and stuff. And after that, we can actually take them over to our crusher and we crush them,” Ian Foster said, a volunteer for OceansWide.
"We’re real proud because they are taking the initiative and they are sticking with us," Scott spoke of the students.
The Gouldsboro facility has prepped over 6,000 traps for proper recycling.