Commercial scale fisheries generate substantial quantities of used fishing nets. Comberplast has developed a process to breakdown the discarded fishing nets and turning them back into useful plastics.
The most successful circular material models are those that make money and turn one product into another while minimizing the property loss of the input material.
This has always been one of the main challenges, specifically for post-consumer plastics. On the top of challenging recycling tasks are materials that have been exposed to salt water and sunlight (UV light), both are not helpful in keeping top material properties. Yet there are companies like Comberplast that are figuring out how to use even these most challenging materials to create well-functioning, quality products – i.e. extracting the value of the original energy and processing that was invested creating the virgin plastic molecule.
Post-consumer plastics can be cleaned up, contaminants removed and with proper compounding methods (e.g. adding additives, color, virgin material) specific material properties can be achieved. Recyclers basically use the “waste” material as feedstock to create a new plastic that has the right properties to make new products and extract maximum “value”