This year at the POC Conference, our Awards trophies were that extra bit special. Not only were they beautiful, but they were (characteristically) fantastically sustainable. They were the handiwork of Waterhaul, a company that collects and mechanically recycles discarded fishing gear into plastic pellets to be turned into new, purposeful products that can be used again and again.

Waterhaul was started in 2018 by Harry Dennis, founder and CEO, and Gavin Parker, co-founder and COO after their work at Surfers Against Sewage brought the issue to light as well as the solution. At this time there were conversations in parliament to legislate against plastic straws and bottles, to prevent them entering the ocean, but no word on preventing discarded fishing gear, “the most harmful and abundant form of ocean plastic,” explained Kieran Hill, head of B2B sales at Waterhaul.

Harry proved that the material could be collected and turned into a product with a purpose, which led to them launching their eyewear range. “Fast forward to today, and the landscape is very different. We’re now a team of, I think 13, and we changed from an eyewear brand partly, to become a company that creates products that connect people with, or allows them to protect, the ocean,” said Kieran.

A couple of years into Waterhaul, they began producing litter picking equipment, “which has been massively popular,” said Kieran, “it allows us to create a product that didn’t exist out of recycled materials. All other litter picking equipment on the market was made from virgin plastics or very low percentage recycled content.” Kieran continued, “it allows us to tell the story and empower our community to go and have their own purpose in their local environment, whether it’s the beach or a park or the city or the town.”

When it came to creating the POC trophies, Waterhaul utilised its community focus further, using discarded personal protective equipment (PPE) to create the trophies. When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, “more and more of these face masks were ending up in waterways, in the ocean, on beaches,” explained Kieran, “so it stemmed from the same place of: this stuff shouldn’t be here. What can we do to try to reduce that?” Realising the wastage of this material was massive issue in the medical industry, Waterhaul began collecting it from a hospital in Truro, a few miles away from where they are based in Cornwall.

“The notion was that what if we could make our litter pickers out of this waste material which could then go on and collect more face masks from the beaches,” said Kieran, “It was a random project that got really good traction and ended up having a really good positive impact.”

However, Waterhaul’s main focus is on end-of-life and ‘ghost’ fishing gear, and it wants to have a big an impact on this problem as it can, which has led it to its most recent direction. “Over the last 12 months, we’ve been laying the foundation of this new era of Waterhaul. So where our focus used to be tackling the mission and turning it into our own products, the switch now is we’re going to be tackling that mission, but allowing other companies and brands to be a part of it directly by selling them our plastic pellets, essentially enabling a much greater and wider positive impact and far outweighing the impact we were going to have just by selling our own products,” commented Kieran.

Waterhaul is continuing its direct-to-consumer product lines, such as its eyewear and litter picking equipment, Kieran noted, however it is also going to develop this new business alongside, where it sells the plastic pellets from the fishing gear it collects to other companies for them to make their products out of. This scaling-up will allow Waterhaul the resources to collect more discarded fishing gear than it already does, creating a further reaching impact.

Since its founding, sustainability has of course been at the forefront of Waterhaul’s blueprint, and with this extended business venture, it wants to ensure this continues with the products that are created from its plastic, even if it is no longer making them itself. This is where Waterhaul’s due diligence comes into play; “We have a process in place where we ask the right questions. We ensure that, for example, the product that they’re making has an end-of-life solution, and we will work with them directly on that front,” said Kieran.

Waterhaul began by wanting to address the devastating environmental impact of ‘ghost’ gear, the term used for fishing gear, such as nets, that are lost or discarded in the ocean. “It’s estimated about 640,000 tons of end-of-life fishing gear is discarded every year globally,” said Kieran. Since it is fundamentally designed to capture marine life, it goes on doing so even after its fishermen owners are long gone, trapping and killing fish, and damaging their habitat.

Fishing nets can end up as ghost gear for a number of reasons: they can be blown overboard in a storm, or they can snag on seabeds and have to be cut loose for the safety of the vessel. However it happens, Kieran explained, the ghost gear essentially poses an issue for the fisherman too; “If you’re throwing this stuff willy nilly into the ocean, you’re putting a competitor in there that’s going to naturally start decreasing the fish stocks and naturally make your life harder.”

So Waterhaul works alongside the fishermen and the ports to tackle this issue. And one of the best ways is to cut it off at the tap, by collecting end-of-life fishing gear before it is sent to landfill, incineration, or into the sea. Some port authorities charge about £300 a ton to dispose of used fishing gear, so Waterhaul is taking it off their hands for free, to avoid the potential of it becoming waste or being discarded at sea and becoming ghost gear in the first place. And if a fisherman has had to discard its gear out at sea for whatever reason, there is work being done in the industry to allow fishermen to report where the net has been lost.

This reporting and traceability of where fishing gear has been rescued, is something important to Waterhaul. The team react to reports of ghost gear and  go on trips to search the coastline; “Wherever this material comes from, we’re able to track and locate where it’s come from,” explained Kieran.

Jake Arney, Waterhaul’s recycling and impact manager, has been working on the company’s traceability system, that gives data as to where each batch of material has been collected, data that can be passed on to the company that purchases the recycled plastic pellets, and even onto the end-consumer. And as legislation starts coming into place for improved traceability of a product’s materials and supply chain, Waterhaul will be ahead of the curve and will be the first port of call for bigger industrial companies to turn to since they already have the process in place.

Looking ahead, Waterhaul plans to develop its partnership base and distribute its recycled plastic pellets to more and more companies, enabling it to scale its collection and traceability operations to have a wider positive environmental impact.