A duvet (and not only) from fishing nets recovered at sea

If someone were to give the Grinch a Patagonian quilt, made with recycled fishing nets, even his heart would be immediately warmed by a renewed green soul. Difficult to resist the invisible threads that bind us to the destinies of the ocean and marine fauna. And so it was also for the well-known US company, which more than others over the years has embraced the environmental cause. Moreover its founder Yvon Chouinardrecalling that “the Earth is now our sole shareholder”, recently sold its entire share package to two entities fighting to protect nature and biodiversity, as well as support communities and tackle the environmental crisis.

“With netplus we transform one of the most harmful factors of plastic pollution in the oceans into something you can wear forever,” says Patagonia. Netplus is a recycled nylon that comes from discarded fishing nets collected in the fishing communities of South America. Normally they would end up in the oceans , adding to the 8.8 million tonnes of plastic (mostly single-use) that are thrown into the sea every year, and scientists estimate that fishing gear is responsible for the death or injury of more than 650,000 marine animals.

Burea’s story

Netplus was born thanks to the work of Bureo (wave in the Chilean of the natives), a small company founded in 2013 in Concepción by globetrotting surfing engineers. Over the past five years, the material has been further leveraged through Tin Shed Ventures, Patagonia’s venture capital fund. Initially the founders Kevin Ahearn, David Stover And Ben Kneppers they had thought of collecting plastic along the beaches, recycling it, transforming it into a product to be sold and thus creating a commercial activity. But once they moved from Australia to Chile to work on a government project dealing with fisheries sustainability, “that’s when we realized the whole waste stream that is produced by this sector,” explained Kevin Ahearn .

And so, with the advantage of focusing on the collection of a single type of artifact, practically identical throughout the world, the Chilean fishing community was involved. “We scrubbed, cleaned and sorted the nets, then took them to a recycling company we hired to turn them into pellets. Once the nets were pelletized, we could use them to produce objects with injection molding,” recalled the founders . Pellets which can then be transformed into melted plastic products, components or fibers. And so they started producing a small cruiser-type plastic skateboard but it was too niche and so thanks to the help of Patagonia “we transformed our company’s model from a product brand to a raw material supplier”.

The first traditional nylon replaced with Netplus was that of the visors and structures of the caps. Then with the development we came to a technical fabric for jackets, quilts and even Patagonia leggings. Bureo went further because with this material Trek makes the bottle cage for its mountain bikes, Costa del Mar a line of sunglasses, Humanscale office chairs and Jenga a line of sustainable games.

One of the limitations of the project is that there is no machine capable of sifting through the net and identifying every minimum residue to be eliminated, so you have to proceed by hand. “We have a team of 16 to 20 people who clean two to three tons of nets a day,” Ahearn stressed. “Last year we collected and processed more than 700 tons of fishing nets in our factories, which is the equivalent of 65 6-metre containers of export material: it was a great achievement for us”.

The future goal, however, is to expand the activities al Peru and then subsequently in Ecuador, Mexico And United States. In summary, going up from 700 tons per year to about 2 thousand tons per year.