Fishing nets are clogging the ocean. This fashion brand is making them into chic swimsuits

When fishermen set out into the ocean, they often return to shore without their nets. Sometimes, pieces of their nets get lost. Sometimes, they choose to abandon them because them because they’re torn beyond repair.



Whatever the case, these plastic nets pose a danger to marine life, trapping turtles, seals, dolphins, even birds. The World Wildlife Fund says that hundreds of animals can be caught in a single net, and it even threatens coral, blocking reefs from sunlight. Researchers say that nearly half of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is made up of these nets. And since plastic does not biodegrade, they will eventually break into tiny particles of microplastic that end up in the food chain, poisoning animals and humans.



[Photo: Vitamin A]



In the midst of this bleak reality, some companies are trying to collect these nets and transform them into new materials. Swimsuit label Vitamin A is one of them. Today, the company is launching a new collection made from recycled ghost nets. It’s using these $200 suits as an opportunity to shed light on the ghost net problem and help grow the market for this recycled material.



Amahlia Stevens founded Vitamin A in 2000 with the aim to create suits from plant-based or recycled textiles. Last year, it was acquired by Swim USA, a company that owns brands like Miraclesuit and Amoressa, and licenses brands like Ralph Lauren and Reebok.



[Photo: Vitamin A]



As Vitamin A’s design team was chatting with their Korea-based fabric supplier, Hyosung, they learned about a brand new material made up of 80% recycled ghost nets and 20% recycled spandex. Vitamin A was immediately interested. “We wanted to support the development of this new material and we thought that the Vitamin A customer would be most likely to understand why it was important,” says Mark Sunderland, VP of product innovation at Swim USA.



[Photo: Vitamin A]



For about a decade, brands have been using recycled nylon that is made from fishing nets that fishermen send in for recycling. But collecting and recycling these ghost nets is a far more complicated process says, Laura Nilo, Hyosung’s U.S. marketing manager. To do so, teams of people must go out into the ocean and retrieve these nets, which are entangled in other debris, seaweed, and dead animals. Often, the material has been significantly degraded from the salt water and elements, making it much harder to recycle than fishing nets that have been collected through traditional recycling channels.



Hyosung partners with a collection company to retrieve tons of these ghost nets, which it then sends through its industrial recycling process. The nets are cleaned and sorted. The nets then go through a depolymerization, which means the nylon is broken down into its fundamental chemical structure, before being re-polymerized. “The goal is to preserve as much usable nylon as possible,” says Nilo.



[Photo: Vitamin A]



Hyosung then created an entirely new fabric for Vitamin A which is largely made up of this recycled ghost nets, but also uses 20% recycled Spandex, to give the material elasticity. When I saw an early sample of the fabric, it looked and felt identical to any other swimwear on the market; it is stretchy and soft to the touch. But it’s much more expensive than other similar materials on the market. “It goes through a far more elaborate recycling process, and this adds to the cost,” Nilo says.



[Photo: Vitamin A]



Vitamin A will sell a collection of bikinis and one-piece bathing suits for between $200 and $240, which is on par with the rest of its collection. The brand sees this as an opportunity to draw attention to the problem of ghost nets through its marketing, and it hopes that other brands will be paying attention too and want to invest in this material, which will ultimately fund the removal of more ghost nets from the ocean. “Our customers want to know that their swimwear is not harming the planet,” says Sunderland says. “But with this line, we’re offering them a product that actively improves the health of our oceans.”