At sunrise in the fishing port of Villajoyosa in eastern Spain, a fleet
of traditional fishing boats sets out on the Mediterranean to hunt for
cuttlefish, prawns — and plastic bottles.
Since July Spanish fishing boats have been picking up plastic waste in
the Mediterranean
which will be recycled into polyester fibres that will be used
to make a high-end clothing line.
“We want to present the first fashion collection made with yarn and
fabric
that come from garbage found at the bottom of the sea in June in Florence,”
said Javier Goyeneche, 45, the president of Ecoalf, the Spanish company
behind
the venture.
Founded in 2010, the Madrid-based firm has already launched “a new
generation” of clothes and accessories made from plastic bottles, old
fishing
nets and used tyres found on land.
The company, which employs 18 people and posted a turnover of 4.5 million
euros (4.8 million dollars) this year, already sells its jackets and
backpacks made
from recycled waste in upscale shops such as Harrods in London and
Bloomingdale in New York.
Now Ecoalf says it will be the first company to make clothes from
recycled
plastic waste found at sea and it has signed on 200 fishing boats in the
eastern region of Valencia to act as scavengers.
“Where others see garbage, I see raw material,” said Goyeneche.
The fishing boats collected two tonnes of plastic waste, and two tonnes
of
other garbage, in just two months, said the president of the federation of
fisherman of the Valencia region, Jose Ignacio Llorca Ramis. The fishermen
are
not paid for their efforts.
“For ecologists, we are predators, but there is at least one thing which
we
have done well: pick up garbage,” joked Jose Vicente Mayor, whose father,
grandfather and great-grandfather were all fishermen.
Mayor, who was worked as a fisherman for the past 19 years, said he has got
used to filling up his Ecoalf container with waste.
“Fisherman used to say: ‘This is not for me, I am throwing it back in the
water’. Today we don’t even throw out a paper!,” he said as he cast his
trawl
some 60 kilometres (40 miles) from the coast.
Standing on the bridges of their boat Mayor and two other fishermen
carefully sort prawns and crabs which they pulled up from the dark and muddy
bottom of the sea.
This time little plastic waste was collected — just a couple of hundred
grammes (0.2 kilos).
“This is because we have already cleaned up this area a lot,” said Mayor.
A staggering eight million metric tones of plastic waste are discharged
into the oceans each year from the world’s 192 coastal countries, according
to
an international study published in the journal Science in February which
was
based on 2010 data.
The trash encompasses just about anything imaginable made of plastic
including shopping bags, bottles, toys, food wrappers, fishing gear,
cigarette
filters, sunglasses, buckets and toilet seats.
In the Mediterranean Sea plastic garbage has been found in the stomachs
of
small fish, birds and sperm whales.
“Sea turtles especially can die from a bowel obstruction when they ingest
plastic bags which they confuse with jellyfish,”said Xema Gil, a
veterinarian
with the Centre for the Preservation of Fauna, a unit of the regional
government of Valencia.
Four million plastic bottles are thrown away each year in Spain,
according
to Gabriel Buldu, commercial director of PET, one of the country’s biggest
recycling firms, lamenting a “social problem”.
The company’s plant in Chiva, a town near the eastern port of Valencia,
will in December start transforming the plastic bottles collected by the
fishermen into synthetic fibres.
They will be shaken, flattened and boiled and then automatically sorted
by
machines or by hand as they move along a conveyer belt before finally being
shredded in giant mixers into tiny flakes.
In January these flakes will be transformed into fibres by Spanish firm
Antex in Girona in northeastern Spain that will be used by Ecoalf to make
its
clothes.
The fibres used in the first clothing collection will me made from
plastic
collected both at sea and on land but the goal is to make fibres entirely
from
sea waste.
“It’s a way to make people conscious of what is happening at the bottom
of
the Mediterranean,” said Goyeneche. (Laurence Boutreux, AFP)