A Look Inside Hyundai’s Ocean Cleanup Partnership With Wholesome Seas — CleanTechnica Area Journey

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664,000 tons of fishing nets are misplaced or discarded into the world’s oceans each single yr, so we had been excited when Hyundai invited us out on an expedition to reclaim two of what they name ghost nets.

Disclaimer Hyundai paid for the authors lodging to attend this occasion.

In partnership with non-profit Wholesome Seas, which Hyundai helps, a volunteer group of divers from Ghost Diving USA group equipped on a diving vessel within the Lengthy Seashore Marina for the 110 foot / 30 meter deep dive all the way down to the shipwreck the place the 2 ghost nets had been snagged simply off the coast of one in every of Southern California’s Channel Islands (Google Maps).

The boat departed early with a full crew of restoration divers, gear, the Wholesome Seas group, and some members of the media in direction of the uncovered Western Coast of Catalina Island. The 90-minute dive would permit the divers sufficient time to get all the way down to the nets, minimize them into manageable items, and connect restoration floats to them.

They use secondary air tanks to inflate the floats. Sending the chunks of recovered nets and equipment as much as the floor. From there, the groups onboard the boat take over, clipping onto the floats and hauling them over to the boat.

From there, it’s very like you’d anticipate — utilizing good old style handbook labor to haul the boat up on deck the place any connected marine life is eliminated. The nets are minimize up into extra manageable sizes and are sorted into comparable supplies. They’re then delivered to shore the place they are often cleaned and processed for recycling.

Recycling plastic from the ocean is just not value efficient in comparison with virgin plastic, however contemplating it must be faraway from the oceans, the incremental effort required to scrub it previous to recycling is minimal. This is likely one of the enormous wins of ocean cleanup efforts, the place they use the recovered plastic to create merchandise which then might be marketed as utilizing recovered plastic. The ensuing merchandise provide a better worth to prospects by letting them immediately help ocean cleanup efforts financially.

For his or her half, Wholesome Seas has partnered with a number of organizations to create the correct provide chain to course of the fishing nets. When the nets are first delivered to shore, they’re moved to a warehouse for storage till a fishing amount might be aggregated to make it price recycling.

The primary cease of their recycling journey is thru an organization known as Aquafil, the place they flip the soiled fishing nets into what’s known as plastic nurdles. These lentil sized pellets are one of many major standardized feedstocks for virgin plastics, and recycled nets are sometimes combined 50/50 with virgin plastic to keep up a base degree of integrity within the ensuing nylon nuggets.

From there they’re despatched on to an organization known as ECONYL, the place the plastic nurdles are extruded into thread that can be utilized to sew or create materials immediately. This thread is what Hyundai makes use of to show the recycled nets immediately into floormats for Hyundai’s autos for the European market. 100% of the yarn in Hyundai’s ECONYL floormats within the IONIQ 5 & 6 are produced from regenerated nylon waste, together with fishing nets. ECONYL is commonplace in floormats for the IONIQ 5 & 6 and accessible as an possibility in different fashions.

Figuring out and recovering fishing nets clearly isn’t a price efficient supply of plastic, however the nets do should be recovered, so they need to even be recycled once they’re introduced again onshore, very like broken fishing nets are on the finish of their life.

Apart from the direct air pollution within the ocean that deserted fishing nets signify, additionally they trigger a mess of different issues:

• Unfastened nets within the ocean create a “curtain of demise” within the ocean, catching and killing marine life.
• Nets break down over time, releasing microplastics into the water.
• Unfastened nets can get caught up in boat props, inflicting injury.
• Lack of tourism.

General

Hyundai’s partnership with Wholesome Seas is a superb instance of how a high-profile firm like Hyundai can use its positioning to boost consciousness of this core situation whereas on the identical time contributing to enhancing the scenario.

Wholesome Seas takes a multi-pronged strategy to coach individuals world wide concerning the issues discarded fishing nets pose and to immediately clear them up. They coordinate seashore cleanup initiatives and bigger, extra intense fishing web restoration expeditions just like the one we had been lucky sufficient to witness.

As a result of the entire 664,000 tons of fishing nets discarded or misplaced on this planet’s oceans solely come from fishing, not consuming fish or decreasing fish consumption can also be a direct motion individuals can take to maintain our oceans clear.

Past that, it could be nice to see efforts targeted on enhancing monitoring of fishing nets or implementing efforts to scale back the move of fishing nets into the world’s oceans.

Simply the identical, it’s nice to see Wholesome Seas and Hyundai stepping as much as maintain our world’s oceans clear. Head to their official web site for extra details about the Hyundai’s partnership with Wholesome Seas or on to the Wholesome Seas web site for details about their efforts.

Featured picture courtesy of Hyundai.