Toray develops fibber

Materials manufacturer Toray Industries and fishing net manufacturer Nitto Seimo announced their recycled purse seine nets will be trialled in the Northern Pacific Ocean this November.

Together with fishing company Taiyo A&F, in November 2022 the Japanese companies a partnership to recycle fishing nets from nylon scraps and process waste from net production. Now, the programme will additionally recover materials from used nylon fishing nets, in what the companies describe as a world first fibre-to-fibre recycling scheme.

There have been various initiatives to reclaim nylon fishing nets - called ghost nets when discarded at sea – but the material is often upcycled into other types of product, like swimwear, rPET, or rPA. However, so far it has been difficult to recycle nylon fish nets into fishing net yarn because the strength and durability of the fibbers deteriorates during the recycling process, due to debris and algae contamination from immersion in the sea.

Toray has now leveraged its depolymerisation chemical recycling technology using nylon from ghost nets to develop a recycled fibber that is reportedly comparable with virgin material. Nitto Seimo is manufacturing the purse seine nets with this fibber and Taiyo A&F’s offshore fishing vessel Taiyo Maru No.21 will deploy them on a trial basis starting November.

The three companies hope to confirm the commercial feasibility of the new fishing nets. Depending on the trial results, they aim to introduce the recycled fishing nets to the market in December 2023.

“This drive to develop nylon fibre-to-fibre recycling technology for fishing nets paves the way for the entire textiles industry to help materialise a circular economy by conserving and recycling resources and reducing wastes across the supply chain,” said Mitsuo Ohya, president of Toray.

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