The first sunglasses made from plastic collected from the sea
The Ocean Cleanup project
Towards the end of 2019, the Ocean Cleanup team returned from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch with its first load of plastic waste collected from the ocean during a pilot test of its waste-fighting technology, proving it could remove plastic from the water’s surface. But then a new obstacle arose in the company’s years of research to prove its effectiveness: how to recycle that plastic so that it wouldn’t become waste again.
“It was actually a real challenge,” says Boyan Slat, CEO and founder of Ocean Cleanup. “The material collected is mixed: half are fishing nets, the other half are harder objects, like bottles and crates. So turning all this into a usable material has been quite a challenge. When we announced we would do it at the end of last year, we didn’t know if we could pull it off.”
Ocean Cleanup: the sunglasses
The nonprofit organization presented today its first recycled plastic product, a pair of sunglasses made from ocean plastic designed by the famous designer Yves Behar and manufactured by the Italian company Safilo. To arrive at the final product, the team worked with a series of partners to select the waste they pulled from the water, wash it, shred it, and turn it into pellets that could be used in manufacturing.
“We had to create a completely new supply chain because this is a material that has never been processed before,” says Slat. The sunglasses are primarily made from abandoned fishing nets and HDPE plastic.
The recycled material has a slightly different appearance from virgin plastic. “We said to ourselves: why not embrace the imperfections? We played with the mix and eventually arrived at this material appearance… it has a slightly wavy and non-homogeneous look. For me, it’s a sort of resource because it’s a reminder of the origins of this plastic.”
The Ocean Cleanup has collaborated with the independent certification body DNV GL to verify the source of the plastic and develop a new international standard on how companies can prove the “source and authenticity” of the marine plastic they use in their products. It is called the Chain of Custody Standard for recovered plastics in the hydrosphere, which defines a set of requirements that companies must meet, including a traceable supply chain “from water to shore.”
According to an estimate, five trillion pieces of plastic are in the world’s oceans, and up to 14 million tons of additional plastic enter the oceans every year. The Ocean Cleanup has taken on the challenge of trying to design a technology capable of collecting plastic from areas like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a vortex where large amounts of waste accumulate and then break down into much smaller pieces of microplastic.