After its creation of our beautiful POC SDG Award trophies last year, we have once again enlisted Waterhaul’s services for this year’s trophies, made from recycled traceable marine plastic.

Waterhaul 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 makes collections of its own products, from sunglasses, reparable litter pickers, and storage boxes, but over the last year it has grown to providing its recycled marine plastic to other brands to make their products from, in partnership with Waterhaul.

“This year, we’ve launched an exciting array of collaborations, products, and further developed our recycling activities. Launching Traceable Marine Plastic has been a huge step forward for us, and we’re excited to update you on that,” says Kieran Hill, head of commercial at Waterhaul.

The brand collaborations that Waterhaul has spearheaded this year include Circular&Co coffee cups, gomi powerbanks, TUI launching Waterhaul sunglasses in its in-flight duty free catalogue, Allday Goods kitchen knives, POTR plant pots, which were launched at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show, picking up an award for Sustainable Business of the Year.

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. 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.

Waterhaul has this year scaled up its rigorous traceability standards, so it can account for every kilogramme of material received at its facility, enabling tracking right through the recycling process, and providing that information to the consumer of the end product.

Other notable achievements by the company since we last caught up with the team last year include the launch of the first ever fishing gear collection scheme on the Isles of Scilly, in partnership with BIFFA, The Duchy, and the fishing community on the islands. Through this initiative, Waterhaul has established a supply chain for a material that was previously causing a waste problem on the islands, and can now make its way to Waterhaul’s facilities for sorting and recycling.

While we are keeping the trophies of the photos for this year’s POC Awards under wraps until the Conference next week, we can, very excitingly, provide you with the tracing information for the batch of recycled marine plastic they were made from and where the fishing gear was found and collected. Click here to see its origins.

We can’t wait to see Waterhaul’s trophies for this year’s POC SDG Awards at the Product’s of Change Conference next week. Make sure you’ll be there too – get your tickets or find out more information about the Conference here.