Newfoundland group alleges plastic waste dumping and derelict equipment by fish farm industry

08-07-2025

On the south coast of Newfoundland near Gaultois is a small cove known as 'The Locker.' The region is sparsely populated — the number of residents in Gaultois has gone down by 80 per cent since the 1990s, following the cod moratorium and ensuing closure of its fish plant. But when the human population plummeted, something else took its place: Atlantic salmon raised in fish farms off the coast. Along with the fish has come litter that one group documented as recently as last month as styrofoam, loose rope, PVC pipe and derelict cages from the aquaculture operations.
In December 2024, abandoned aquaculture equipment — including old sea cages, plastic, netting and feed bags — was identified at The Locker by the conservation group, Atlantic Salmon Federation (ASF), which prompted an order from Fisheries Minister Gerry Byrne for owner Cooke Aquaculture to clean it up. According to the CBC, the cleanup was completed in January 2025.
On February 1, the ASF chartered a helicopter to fly over The Locker, and Neville Crabbe, vice president of communications and special projects for the group, said 'it was all cleaned up … none of the surface waste was visible.'
'But when we went back on June 23, it was there again, which was sort of mind-boggling,' he said.
The visit to The Locker showed that 'significant amounts of salmon farm equipment in very poor condition have been hauled back into the area,' according to the report, as well as 'severely damaged salmon farm rings, loose ropes, and Styrofoam particles floating away from the site.' They also travelled to nearby Roti Bay, which has six active fish farm licences held by Cooke Aquaculture and Ocean Trout Canada, and found 'substantial abandoned equipment and other debris, … including long ropes anchored to the bottom floating across the surface of the water.' Roti Bay had the most obsolete equipment, explained Crabbe, at 132 cages in 2016 and 48 in March 2025.
Findings from the site visits built on ASF's documentation of plastic waste from 2024 and were released in tandem with a broader satellite survey of all aquaculture sites in the province, which documented damaged and obsolete equipment from 2011 (when high-resolution satellite imagery became available) and 2025. On Tuesday, those findings were released, which Crabbe says shows six sites with recent or ongoing dumping issues.
A NL group has documented styrofoam, loose rope, PVC pipe and derelict cages from aquaculture operations in the province as recently as last month, and says a moratorium should be placed on open net pen salmon farm development in the province.
In response to the findings, Keith Sullivan, executive director of the Newfoundland Aquaculture Industry Association, said the ASF is 'knowingly misleading people because they know that equipment recycling has been ongoing for some time, they know that all equipment is housed on licensed lease sites and they know recent images they represent as the Locker is actually a separate nearby licensed site."
In response, Crabbe said that the images taken in 2024 and 2025 of The Locker were in slightly different locations, but all in the same overall area, and all within what would be considered The Locker. He said either way, it is garbage and unused equipment that Cooke — which holds all leased sites in The Locker — should be held accountable for.
According to Sullivan, much of the unused equipment highlighted by the ASF study connects to historical producers who went bankrupt, some of which 'did not dispose of equipment properly, or equipment was otherwise not removed according to modern practices.'
Cleanup of 'legacy abandoned equipment' began in 2016, and 'is close to being completed in line with federal and provincial requirements,' Sullivan said. In May 2025, Mowi Canada East announced it had recycled 260 tonnes of obsolete equipment.
Canada's National Observer reached out to the government of Newfoundland and Labrador, who did not respond by deadline.
As of August 2024, there were 115 active fish farming licenses in Newfoundland and Labrador, though only 19 are stocked with fish –— four with trout, the rest salmon.
'As an industry, they're trying to expand,' Crabbe said.. 'They need to maintain their social license, and they've hauled stuff back into that location,' he said, explaining that they'd gotten tips from people working in the industry.
Along with highlighting unused equipment and waste, ASF set out to document the underutilization of existing fish farm sites as the industry eyes expansion. It found 53 of the 106 licensed sites in the province had no farming equipment between 2020 and 2025. Mowi Canada East is proposing to add over two million smolts to its existing salmon farm operations along the south coast of the province, while the Newfoundland government previously set a goal of increasing salmon production to 50,000 megatonnes per year, a significant increase from the most recent Statistics Canada numbers which put production of farmed salmon and trout at about 15,600 in 2023.
To Crabbe, the underutilization of sites combined with the presence of garbage and derelict equipment is only the tip of the iceberg, which is why the ASF is calling for a moratorium on salmon farm expansion.
Unlike in British Columbia, where open-net pen salmon farms are being phased out by 2029 by the federal government, the Atlantic Coast has no deadline.
This contrasting approach to fish farming is due in part to a years-old court case which led to a discrepancy in who calls the shots in the two regions. In British Columbia, the federal department of Fisheries and Oceans has shared jurisdiction and ultimate decision-making power over fish farming, whereas in Atlantic waters, it is solely a provincial responsibility.
The plastic pollution 'is the part you see,' Crabbe said. 'There's so much else that's happening: serious disease outbreaks, mass mortality events, interbreeding.'