Blue Ocean Gear

Blue Ocean Gear makes GPS tracking buoys for commercial fishing gear, and the software that watches them. Roughly 700,000 tons of fishing gear is lost at sea each year. Crews burn fuel and days hunting for traps and nets they can't find, and what stays lost keeps fishing forever: ghost gear catches and kills indefinitely, entangles whales, and makes up more than half of all ocean plastic by weight.

A buoy that reports its position turns a lost trap into a retrievable one, which saves the fisher the replacement cost and the search, and takes the gear out of the water before it does decades of damage. The environmental case and the operator's case are the same case, which is why this works: nobody has to be persuaded to care. The buoys also read the ocean as they drift, building a dataset from the one fleet that is already out there every day.