ADDITIVE MANUFACTURING
THE NET BACK OF
How one company’s mission to tackle fi shing net waste is demonstrating the possibilities of circular economy additive manufacturing
Thousands of tonnes of engineering-grade nylon used in fi shing nets goes to waste every year A
t fi rst, tackling waste from used fi shing nets may appear to be a niche issue. In reality, though, it’s a
global one, with 150,000 to 200,000 tonnes of high value Nylon 6 polymer being consumed every year just in the process of making one type of net. As Ian Falconer, founder of Fishy Filaments, explains, “The majority of these nets are currently buried or burned at the end of their lives, which is generally somewhere between six months and a year. A recent paper by Richardson et al from the Australian science agency CSIRO found that globally around 2% of gill nets are lost at sea, which means that 98% of them get returned to land for disposal. So, that’s many tens of thousands of tonnes of engineering- grade nylon every year that gets used for a few months then put to waste.” Falconer fi rst launched Fishy
Filaments as a project in 2016, then as a funded company a year later, with the initial goal of commercialising IP that he had developed with strong
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potential to make plastics recycling more eff icient. The process found its home in the fi shing industry, where it can be applied to clean the algal biofi lm off used fi shing nets. “We’ve set out to fi nd a way to
bring the Nylon 6 contained in those nets back into industrial use,” says Falconer. “Unlike conventional plastics recycling challenges, the logistics of fi shing net collection have historically robbed the activity of a means to return value to those at the sharp end, the fi shing communities where end-of-life nets accumulate.”
ENTER 3D PRINTING Over the years, Fishy Filaments has been working hard to prove its recycling process, understand the invention and how it can scale, and identify potential markets for the new materials it can process. “When we launched our MVP,
a world-fi rst 100% recycled PA6 fi lament for 3D printing, it was with the understanding that we didn’t know the
marketplace and little data existed to help us,” Falconer continues. “It ended up winning us the 3D Printing Industry News award in 2021 in a public vote of over 140,000. So, we knew we had a product that could engage with public sentiment, even if it wasn’t an immediate commercial hit.” Since then, Falconer and his team
have been working with hundreds of customers around the world to explore the material’s capabilities, winning multiple global design awards. However, he concedes, “We knew it wasn’t the easiest material to use and its application was really limited to professional or semi-professional customers rather than having a wider appeal in the hobbyist market. Even from the earliest days I had my eye on recycled carbon fi bre (CF) as the perfect fi t for our recycled nylon and a means to add functionality to the raw recyclate. That idea was shared in principle when the company launched, but it took until 2022 before the product line that became 0rCA was realised.”
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