New Life of the Discarded Fishing Nets

What can be done with discarded fishing nets in the ocean?

In Jiaxing of China, the discarded fishing nets can be transformed into traceable clothing by recycle, processing, and reuse.

Recently, the reporter saw the transformed products with the discarded fishing nets at Zhejiang Yingruite Recycled Materials Technology Co., Ltd. located in Xiuzhou District, Jiaxing, including a variety of fashionable clothing such as hoodies, sweaters, and T-shirts. Scan the QR code on a T-shirt via phone, you can see that the T-shirt contains over 70g components of fishing nets from ocean

This T-shirt looks almost identical to regular clothing in appearance, but in addition to 70% cotton, it also contains 30% InResST nylon, which is recycled nylon converted from over 70g of discarded marine fishing nets. ” Shen Yi who is the general manager of the company stated that recently many international first-line clothing brands have begun to focus on environmental protection concepts, which brings huge market opportunities to enterprises

Create RMB100 million production value via recovering 58000 tons of fishing nets

According to Shen Yi, fishing nets are mainly composed of nylon (PA), polypropylene (PP), and polyethylene (PE). Recycled waste fishing nets undergo at least 21 fine processing procedures such as cleaning, granulation homogenization, color matching, injection molding etc.

PA is prioritized for use in the textile industry, from nylon slicing to spinning and weaving fabrics, to use in various clothing manufacturing. Both PP and PE are developed for producing injection molded products such as suitcases, hangers, phone shells, sunglasses, etc. Up to now, Yingruite has accumulated over 58000 tons of discarded fishing nets, the company's output value reached RMB 65 million last year.  and it will break though RMB 100 million in expectation this year.

For the global, marine litter pollution remains a serious , but positive changes have begun in coastal areas of China. Shen Yi revealed that the factory invested and constructed by the company in Vietnam is about to be put into use, and it has also participated in the release of the group standard "Traceability Evaluation and Carbon Reduction Accounting Guidelines for Recycling of Marine Fishing Waste Plastics". In the future, the company will further expand its international market and contribute more Chinese wisdom and strength to global marine ecological protection.