What is the ocean?
Not, “how do you define the ocean?” I mean, what is the ocean to you? What role does it play in your life?
If I’m being honest, as a city boy hailing from landlocked Atlanta, my answer isn’t a very good one. The ocean is primarily a vacation destination to me. In it, I seek some combination of entertainment, beauty and peace. Sure, I value that it plays a crucial role in climate systems and provides a wide range of amazing foods. Still, those aspects feel rather tangential to what the ocean has always been for me – a place I journey to when wanting an escape from “real life.”
Which means I am out of touch with those people whose “real lives” depend on the ocean every day.
I mentioned in my Great Barrier Reef post a couple of weeks ago that billions of people rely upon fish as their primary protein source. To back that claim up, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) estimates that number to be three billion people.
That’s three billion people with a significant vested interest in the health of our oceans, oceans that are threatened by acidification, overfishing, plastic pollution and other human-induced perils. We owe it to them (and to all of us, really) to do what we can to heal the ocean we’ve collectively harmed.
So what can we do? We can avoid sunscreens with chemicals that are harmful to aquatic life (unfortunately, that’s most of them). We can ask our restaurant servers if the fish they are offering is sustainably sourced, and decline it if it’s not. We can limit our carbon footprints, thereby limiting the amount of carbon that eventually dissolves into the oceans and acidifies them.
And every now and again, if the stars align properly, we can create innovative programs that are simply brilliant. Like Net-Works™!
Here’s the idea. Interface, through its commitment to a closed-loop manufacturing process, is always on the lookout for sources of nylon that can be recycled and turned into carpet face fiber. One source of that nylon turns out to be fishing nets commonly used in coastal communities (i.e. the homes of those three billion people I mentioned, many of whom are quite poor).
Unfortunately, when such fishing nets break or wear out, they are often simply discarded overboard or along beaches. This practice presents a problem for local wildlife that become entangled in the nets.
Net-Works, which was launched in 2012 in the Philippines through a partnership with the Zoological Society of London (ZSL), steps in to solve these multiple challenges. ZSL first creates a micro-bank in a poor coastal village. This bank then serves as a purchasing hub for gathered and cleaned fishing nets, which are sent to one of Interface’s yarn suppliers for recycling. Interface then purchases the recycled nylon and creates carpet tile from old fishing nets.
The environment wins as the fishing net pollution is reduced. The fishing villages win with access to micro-finance, a cleaner environment, and a bit of extra revenue. Interface wins by increasing the recycled content in its supply chain. Pure triple bottom line goodness.
All told, over 125 metric tons of waste nets have been collected in the program. Moreover, the program is scalable, and I’m proud to say that the NextGen Committee of the Ray C. Anderson Foundation (Ray’s grandchildren and their spouses) chose to support ZSL a couple of years ago in expanding Net-Works to Cameroon.
Hopefully, the model will scale even further. That would be a win we can all celebrate!
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