Charis McGowan: Ocean plastic was choking Chile’s shores. Now it’s in Patagonia’s hats
In Tumbes, a village in
southern Chile,
discarded plastic fishing nets are crammed into gaps between parked cars and
market stalls, evidence of a global waste problem that the town is working to
resolve. Until recently, most
discarded fishing nets in this coastal fishing village were dumped straight
into the sea – contributing to the massive plastic pollution crisis that’s
choking the planet’s oceans. “If you have a broken
net, you throw it anywhere you can,” says Ramon Maldonado, a fisherman in
Tumbes.
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But a startup called
Bureo – founded by three North American surfers – is collaborating with
fishermen like Maldonado to keep hundreds of tonnes of discarded nets out of
the ocean each year. Nets are sorted,
cleaned, and cut in Bureo’s warehouse in Concepción, a city a few miles from
Tumbes. Here they are turned into 100% recycled polyester and nylon pellets,
called NetPlus, which are sold to companies as a sustainable alternative to
first-use plastics. Today NetPlus is used
in Patagonia’s hat brims, Trek bike parts, Humanscale office chairs – and even
sustainable Jenga sets. Bureo joins dozens of
initiatives addressing an urgent environmental question: how do we tackle our
ocean plastic problem? And can we do it without reducing plastic use?...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/24/ocean-plastic-recycling-patagonia-chileOwen Jones: Why don’t we treat the climate crisis with the same urgency as coronavirus?
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