A West Australian company has developed new burley and lobster bait boxes to let anglers and crayfishers go plastic-free, paving the way for cleaner fishing in a plastic-filled world.

WA has about 750,000 recreational fishers and 52,000 licenced recreational crayfishers with roughly 140,000 of them fishing from boats. And each year West Australians make about 400,000 recreational fishing boat trips.

Recfishwest gave the burley boxes a go on Tuesday morning. Credit:James Florisson, Recfishwest.

And all the bait they use - mulies, mullet, tuna heads, prawns - is covered in plastic, be it bags or vacuum-sealed plastic liners.

That’s a lot of plastic entering the system, either ending up in landfill or even being whipped by the wind from a jetty or deck and into our oceans and waterways where wildlife can mistake it for food or get trapped in it, meeting an early death.