The difficluty for wild life is getting entangled in the line & this cannot happen if you cut it up.Indeed I read somewhere that it makes a an ideal nest building material!
Birds do use it for nest material, but there are far better natural material for building nests of course and birds were building nests long before the development of monofilament
I suspect burning it does have some environmental impact in terms of release of gases although obviously very limited.
Yes burning will have some environmental impact, but I would suggest it is very difficult to measure and will ameliorate into the atmosphere very rapidly and nothing of course in comparison to the car emittents we used to drive to the lake
Monk, I can't say what the rot-down time for monofilaments is and would think a lot has to do with the thickness anyway, probably around 2-3 years for fine lines though. The scourge of this country is disposable nappies that take upto 20 years to rot and they're filling our voids quicker than any other type of waste.
Thickness, yes, its the amount of material of course Jeff and yes nappies are a real problem,
Here's a test: if one swim was occupied every day of the year (365 or 275 days if it's a river) and evey angler chopped up 2" of fine line that would amount to about 20 yards of line. Wrap 20 yards of .12 line around you fingers and then cut it into 1.5 cm lengths and count them all. Take them into your garden and release them all around you. Then take a magnifying glass and see how many you can retrieve immediately and after a year see if any more turn up and a further year later do a final tally on how many pieces of line (and dead birds) you find. Then come back to this thread and let us know.
sounds reasonable, but who said anything about birds being effected by cut up monofilament??
I just prefer to burn it.