Fisheries ministry issues national guidelines to keep lost and worn fishing gear out of the sea, with pilots at Bitung, Cilacap and Pengambengan

Indonesia now has a national rulebook for one of the most persistent and least visible streams of marine litter: fishing gear that is lost, abandoned or simply worn out. On Thursday, 8 October 2026, the Ministry of Marine Affairs and Fisheries (KKP) announced guidelines for managing abandoned, lost or otherwise discarded fishing gear (ALDFG) together with end of life fishing gear (EOLFG). The guidelines are set out in Director General of Capture Fisheries Decree No. 23 of 2026 and are framed explicitly around reduce, reuse and recycle principles and the circular economy.

The step matters for the waste sector because it moves fishing nets, ropes, traps and floats from an environmental footnote into a managed material stream with a defined path from sea to shore and back into the value chain. It also gives fishing ports, which already run plastic collection programmes, a clearer mandate and a common method.

What the ministry has put in place

According to the ministry's statement, reported by ANTARA, Katadata and Jejak Profil, the decree serves as the reference for managing fishing gear from upstream to downstream. In practice that means the full life of a net, from the point it is bought and used, through repair and reuse, to the moment it is retired or lost, and finally to collection and recycling.

Director General of Capture Fisheries Lotharia Latif, who has led the directorate general since 10 September 2025 according to the ministry's official profile, explained why the issue deserves dedicated rules.

Director General of Capture Fisheries Lotharia Latif framed the issue on 8 October in plain terms. Abandoned, lost or discarded fishing gear is more than waste. Left unmanaged, it keeps catching fish, damages habitats, endangers navigation and ultimately harms fishers themselves.

This phenomenon is widely known as ghost fishing. A drifting gillnet or a lost trap does not stop working when its owner loses it. It continues to entangle fish, turtles and other marine life, and it can foul propellers and reefs. That makes ALDFG both a biodiversity question and a livelihoods question, which is why the ministry has placed the guideline within its Blue Economy policy. Jejak Profil notes that reducing plastic waste at sea is one of the ministry's five Blue Economy programmes.

The economic logic at the centre of the guideline is simple and practical. Latif said that when used gear keeps a value, fishers have a reason to bring old nets back to shore rather than leave them at sea. Turning a liability into a recoverable material is the core idea of a circular system, and the ministry has chosen to build the policy around that incentive.

Three ports to test the model

The guideline will first be tested at three fishing ports:

• PPS Bitung in North Sulawesi, an ocean fishing port and a major tuna landing hub.
• PPS Cilacap on the southern coast of Central Java, which faces the Indian Ocean.
• PPN Pengambengan in Jembrana, Bali, a centre of the sardine fishery in the Bali Strait.

The three sites span very different fleets and gear types, from large pole and line and purse seine vessels to small scale coastal fishers. That diversity should give the ministry useful evidence on which collection, storage and recycling arrangements work in which settings before a wider roll out.

Field practice will be strengthened through partners already active on the issue. The Arafura and Timor Seas Ecosystem Action (ATSEA) programme will support work at the Merauke fishing port in South Papua, and the Environmental Justice Foundation (EJF) will contribute through its activities in Muncar, Pengambengan and fishing communities in Gresik. ATSEA and the ministry have been building this foundation for some time. IPB University reported that a strategic planning workshop on ALDFG management in Makassar, initiated by ATSEA and KKP, brought together 47 participants and produced recommendations on reporting rules, fisher training, an ALDFG database for the Arafura Sea and cross sector collaboration.

International development partners have welcomed the decree. Sandrine Boucher, Country Director of the Agence Française de Développement (AFD), praised the regulation, affirmed continued support for Indonesia's Blue Economy agenda and expressed the hope that the pilot could be adopted by other countries.

The numbers behind fishing gear waste

The guideline builds on data that the ministry and its partners have gathered over several years. The figures below come from different studies and methods, so they describe the scale of the issue rather than a single consistent series.

• Collection at ports already works at scale. Mongabay Indonesia reported in August 2026 that plastic waste handling at fishing ports ran at 150 ports in 2025 and brought ashore 763.97 tonnes from 25,565 vessels. In 2026 the programme was running at 121 fishing ports, with 143.38 tonnes collected from 8,857 vessels at the time of that report. The 2026 figure reflects a year still in progress, so the two years should not be read as a like for like comparison. KKP also recorded 12 fishing ports showing an upward trend across the two years.
• Lost gear is measured in hundreds of tonnes. Mongabay Indonesia, citing a KKP research journal, reported in May 2025 that 640 tonnes of fishing gear are declared lost every year.
• Ghost gear appears in large numbers. The same report cited an IPB University study across six regions that found at least 18 ghost gear items appearing at sea each month, and 28,178 units in a year in the waters of several regions, equivalent to losses of Rp507,204,000.
• Recycling pilots are proving the concept. The Net Free Seas programme collected and recycled 10 tonnes of fishing gear waste in Indonesia during its first phase from 2023 to 2025, and more than 200 tonnes across Indonesia, Thailand and Ghana. A second phase runs from October 2025 to September 2027 and extends to East Java and Bali with a focus on ALDFG management at fishing ports. Mongabay reported that the first phase generated additional income of Rp81 million for participating fishers and an estimated Rp1.8 million a month for each group coordinator.

These figures point to a clear opportunity. Ports already have collection routines, fishers are already bringing plastic ashore, and recycling partners have shown that old nets can generate income. Decree No. 23 of 2026 gives these efforts a shared national reference.

Building on an established policy path

The new guideline is the latest step in a sequence of instruments. Presidential Regulation No. 83 of 2018 on Marine Debris Management set the national framework and the target of reducing marine litter by 70 percent by 2025. The ministry followed with Ministerial Decree No. 130 of 2023 on the Action Plan for Plastic Waste Management in the Marine and Fisheries Sector, which KKP has described as a systematic and measurable instrument for addressing ALDFG. In December 2024 it issued a circular on guidelines for managing plastic waste from fishing gear.

Lingga Prawitaningrum, who leads the ministry's fishing gear working team, told Mongabay in August that managing ALDFG and EOLFG forms part of national plastic waste management and that recycling involving fishers, businesses and communities can support a circular economy and strengthen local economic capacity. The new decree turns that direction into operational guidance at port level.

Fishing nets are one of the few marine litter streams with a clear owner, a known point of sale and a natural return point at the harbour. That makes them unusually well suited to a managed circular system.

Sirkularium's view: what this means for government and public institutions

Sirkularium regards Decree No. 23 of 2026 as a well designed, practical step that brings a specialised waste stream into the national circular economy agenda. Several elements stand out for policymakers, port authorities and regional governments.

Ports as circular hubs. Fishing ports already function as the collection point for fishing vessel plastic. Equipping the three pilot ports with dedicated reception areas for worn nets, simple sorting by polymer type, and links to recyclers would allow each port to act as a materials recovery node. Success at Bitung, Cilacap and Pengambengan can then be documented and replicated across the 150 ports that took part in plastic collection in 2025.

Value as the incentive. The ministry's emphasis on keeping value in used gear is the right foundation. Nylon gillnets and polyethylene ropes are recyclable materials with established markets. Regional governments and port operators can support offtake agreements with recyclers and explore buy back or deposit arrangements so that returning a net is always more attractive than discarding it.

Gear marking and reporting. Experience from the ATSEA work in the Arafura Sea shows the value of a shared ALDFG database and clear reporting rules. Simple gear marking and a reporting channel at the port would help the ministry measure progress and focus recovery efforts where losses are highest.

A natural fit with extended producer responsibility. As Indonesia continues to develop its extended producer responsibility framework, fishing gear manufacturers and distributors are logical partners for take back and design for recycling. The pilot provides a timely evidence base for that conversation.

Regional collaboration. AFD's interest in seeing the model adopted elsewhere reflects Indonesia's opportunity to lead in Southeast Asia on fishing gear circularity, building on the ATSEA partnership with neighbouring countries.

What to watch next: publication of the full text of the decree, the start date and operating model at the three pilot ports, the first collection and recycling volumes reported from those sites, and how the guideline links with the ministry's port plastic programme and the 2026 to 2029 targets for fishing port waste management. Sirkularium will follow the pilots closely and stands ready to support public institutions designing the collection, financing and offtake arrangements that will carry this model to scale.