If you care about the environment, clearly you should care about the 40 tons or more of nets and other marine debris that wash up on Hawai'i shores each year.

If you care about the economy, you should be equally concerned and supportive of the federal, state and private efforts to control and remove all that debris.

As reported by science writer Jan TenBruggencate, a massive effort to control marine debris is making a dent in the problem. In 1996 some 4.9 tons of debris were collected from the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, where much of it ends up. Last year, 125 tons were collected and removed.

But there is always more.

A particular problem is the nets associated with commercial fishing operations. Nets are lost at sea or sometimes abandoned, where they become a hazard to marine wildlife, reefs and even other boaters.

It is obvious that there are big costs associated with this — both the costs of removing the debris as well as the economic costs of lost time, damaged equipment and environmental losses.

Authorities have discussed various ways of "tagging" or otherwise identifying equipment so that the original user can be assessed at least some of the cost of its collection and removal.

It would be easy enough to require tags on all commercial fishing nets, but those can be easily removed or lost.

What is needed is some kind of identification system in which the rope itself, or any small part of the net, can be identified and traced back to the original user.

The technology and its associated costs would have to be carefully considered. But when weighed against the economic and environmental costs associated with this marine debris, it might well be worth it.