Interface is the latest company to join the Health Seas initiative

Nov 1, 2013 18:36 GMT  ·  By
The Healthy Seas initiative aims to rid seas, oceans of discarded fishing nets resting on their floor
   The Healthy Seas initiative aims to rid seas, oceans of discarded fishing nets resting on their floor

Company Interface has teamed up with the folks behind the Healthy Seas initiative, and is getting ready to turn discarded fishing nets recovered from seas and oceans into environmentally friendly carpet tiles.

By the looks of it, the company is no stranger to this practice. However, thanks to its partnership with Healthy Seas, they will have much more raw material to work with.

Good for businesses, good for turtles, dolphins and other marine creatures, I'd say.

“We are strong advocates of scavenging waste from one industry for use in another, and see this as a natural extension of the work we are already doing within our own business to convert waste into valuable raw materials for new products,” the company's Vice President, Nigel Stansfield, explained in a statement, as cited by Business Green.

“We are proud to be doing something that we feel strongly about for the good of the wider textiles industry and, crucially, for the good of the environment,” he added.

After being removed from aquatic environments, the fishing nets are to be recycled into ECONYL yarn, which can be used to manufacture not just carpets, but also clothing.

The Healthy Seas initiative has thus far removed over 20 tons of discarded fishing nets, and these from the North Sea alone. The environmentalists plan to clean up Italy's, Slovenia's, Croatia's and Spain's coastlines in the not too distant future.

They hope that, at some point, they will succeed in removing all the 640,000 tons of fishing nets that are presently littering ocean and sea floors worldwide.