Mediterranean plastic waste recycled into clothes

200 Spanish fishing boats have begun to collect plastic waste at sea Mediterranean coast. A Madrid factory is going to undertake the recycling of this waste to make a fabric for a clothing brand.

For several months, the fishermen of the Community Valencia They systematically collect saturated polyester waste, which floats in the Mediterranean Sea, and which will soon be recycled into an exclusive fashion collection.

This Madrid company launched in 2010 is proud to have created a new generation of clothing y accessories from plastic bottles collected on the ground, in fishermen's nets, and also from used wheels. "You don't have to keep digging deeper and deeper into the ground to produce oil," says its founder. “Where others see garbage, we see a raw material and we can transform it into fabrics through sophisticated research and development processes ”.

If there are therefore clothes made from waste plastic recycledIt would be a first to create them from those that are also recovered from the sea. For this, 200 fishing boats from the Valencian Community have agreed to do the work of garbage dumps.

In 2010, between 5 and 13 million tonnes of waste plastic were dumped into the oceans, according to an international study published in February in the journal Science. For 2015, the forecast is 9 million tons. In 2014, an international study estimated that at least 269.000 tons of plastic waste were present in the global ocean. The Mediterranean coast It is the sixth largest region of accumulation of plastic waste on the planet. In this almost closed sea, the plastic waste They are found in the stomach of small fish, seabirds, sperm whales, and turtles.

At the factory Valencia, the first tons of waste collected by fishermen will be transformed in December. Visiting this factory is a lesson in ecology, the Recycling process It is so complex that no visitor will throw away any plastic packaging with the same lightness as before.