One man's mission to recycle old fishing nets

Ian Falconer kept thinking about the heaps of discarded plastic fishing nets he saw at Newlyn harbour near his home in Cornwall. "I thought 'it's such a waste'?" he says.

- Rupert Neate

"There has to be a better solution than it all going into landfill."

Falconer, 52, who studied environmental and mining geology at university, came up with a plan: shredding and cleaning the worn out nets, melting the plastic down and converting it into filament for 3D printing. He then built a “micro-factory” so that the filament could be made into useful stuff.

“Every year, up to 1m tonnes of fishing nets are discarded,” he says. “Most of that ends up in landfill or is burned, or worse still finds its way back into the oceans. This showed there was another way for some of that material.”

When he started in 2016, the first big challenge he encountered was getting hold of the nets. But he badgered the Newlyn harbour master into giving him a few to test his theory in his kitchen.

Since its launch the following year, Falconer's company OrCA (previously Fishy Filaments) has raised over £1m from investors in more than 40 countries.

The investment funded the development of patented new machinery that can convert more than 20kg of nylon fishing nets an hour. He claims the process has less than 3% of the carbon impact of producing new nylon.