ACLC’s Fishing Line Recycling Program
Why Recycle Fishing Line?
Loons and other wildlife often get tangled in fishing line, especially during the summer months when more loons are in the Adirondacks and more people are out fishing. Sometimes loons eat a fish that broke the line and accidentally ingest the line into their throat and GI tract. In other cases, the line was caught in something under the water or in vegetation overhanging the water. When a loon gets tangled in fishing line, it can lead to serious injury and even death.
Entanglement in fishing line can cause a slow and needless death as it can prevent a loon from eating and result in infections when the line wears into the loon’s mouth or elsewhere on its body.
Fortunately, this environmental problem is easy to solve!
Help Protect Loons and Other Wildlife…
Please Recycle Fishing Line!
If you are out on a lake and find fishing line along the shoreline, under water (snorkeling is a great way to find line under water), or stuck in trees, logs, or other places, please pick it up and recycle it! When it comes to picking up abandoned fishing line, a small action can make a big difference!
ACLC field staff and volunteers check fishing line recycling containers.
To help you recycle abandoned fishing line, the Adirondack Center for Loon Conservation offers fishing line recycling containers to interested community groups (Note - there is no charge for a fishing line recycling container, but donations are always welcome to enable us to make more).
Volunteers maintain these containers and recycle any line that is discarded in them. The line from these containers is mailed to Berkley Recycling, a fishing line recycling facility in Iowa, to help keep Adirondack lakes safe for loons and other wildlife.
Click here to download this brochure to learn more about how fishing line and lead fishing tackle injure loons.
This project was made possible through the generous support of Northern New York Audubon, Genova Products, the NYS Council and Lake Champlain Chapters of Trout Unlimited, Algonquin Chapter of the Adirondack Mountain Club, Coakley’s Home and Hardware, Hotel Saranac, Adirondack Awards, Stacked Graphics, the New York Backcountry Hunters and Anglers, and Curtis Lumber.
This project is funded through a grant from the US Fish and Wildlife Service on behalf of the Bouchard Barge 120 Buzzards Bay Oil Spill Trustees.
Organize a Regular Lake-Clean-Up
Help Adirondack loons and their lakes even more by coordinating a regular lake clean-up throughout the year! Maintaining a clean shoreline and lake-bed is very important to the health of the wildlife.
The good news is that sometimes loons can get rid of hooks and line on their own. The loon above was first observed in late September with 4 hooks and a small amount of line hanging from its mouth.
Unfortunately, we are not always able to rescue loons that are tangled in line- some loons are especially talented at evading our capture attempts. In this case, it was rewarding to document the loon gradually losing all 4 hooks and the line over the course of a month.
Photos courtesy of J. Bartholomew, 2017.