Nicole Baker Loke

Nicole Baker is a former North Pacific groundfish fisheries observer (2010-2015) and the founder of Net Your Problem LLC. Net Your Problem collects fishing gear from fishermen and sends it to recyclers who turn it into the raw material needed to manufacture plastic products.

At the end of Nicole’s time as an observer, she noticed lots of old fishing nets lying around, and after reading about Parley for the Oceans’ collaboration with Adidas to make a sneaker out of confiscated fishing nets, realized that there was an option to recycle them. Since 2017, Nicole has been working on building relationships with industry and manufacturers to recycle fishing gear.

Net Your Problem has been actively establishing programs to dispose of waste in remote fishing communities and currently operates in Alaska, Maine and California. Projects are in development for other ports on all the US Coasts. Over 914,000 lbs of fishing gear has been recycled so far, from individual fishing vessels and by partnering with Native Tribes and community groups. Nicole has lived on multiple islands, and is familiar with the limited options these types of communities have for waste disposal.

Nicole has given presentations for many different audiences, including at industry meetings, inter-governmental meetings, for waste management practitioners, to entire communities and to other entrepreneurs. She has done 30 interviews, both in print, podcast, Instagram TV and live radio to talk about her work, and has been mentioned in articles by Forbes, Geekwire, National Fishermen and Fishermens News. In April 2020, Net Your Problem completed a Maritime Accelerator program, and pitched to a virtual audience of 250 maritime professionals and investors.