Whenever fisherfolk discovered holes in their fishing nets and discarded them in the deep seas, little did they know that these could be repurposed into parts for their mobile phone or for the vehicle that hauls their catch.  

But now many who make a livelihood out of fishing on the southern coast of India do know that they can sell them if they take the trouble of bringing them back to the beach. That is because Envalior, a company born in 2023, has spread the word that it is ready to buy discarded fishing nets, which it repurposes into high performance material to be used for a variety of applications. 

Dusseldorf headquartered Envalior has a hundred-year global heritage in materials and was formed with the coming together of a Dutch and German company, DSM Engineering Materials and LANXESS High Performance Materials, respectively. For a year and a half now, its Indian subsidiary has been collecting fishing nets from India’s southern coast through local supplier partners. The suppliers in turn employ the local neighbourhood to collect the nets, free them from sand, seashells and weeds, and ready them to be transported to one of Envalior’s three factories in India. 

It is at these destinations that the upcycled fishing nets are melted, upgraded and enhanced with additives to give extra strength to the material. The engineering expertise soon turns the fishing nets into the product Akulon RePurposed. This is part of the Akulon family of high-performance polyamide 6 and polyamide 66 materials that come in the form of granules and are used as parts in a variety of products — from mobile phones, chargers to electrical and electronic devices, white goods, furniture, even surfboard accessories. The material is exported as well to countries such as Korea.  

waste plastic

 “As much as 6,40,000 tonnes of fishing nets are dumped every year into the ocean globally, our aim is to bring them back and clean the oceans of waste plastic. Our strategy encompasses offering a range of polymers with reduced product carbon footprints,” says Nileshkumar Kukalyekar, Business Director, South Asia, Middle East and Africa at Envalior, as he explains the entire process and roots for a sustainable future.

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