Extrusion International USA 6-2019

44 Extrusion International 6/2019 CIRCULAR ECONOMY – INTERVIEW “We want to do something about the garbage on the seas“ Bureo is a US company that turns old fishing nets into new products such as skateboards. How did you come up with fishing nets as a start-up? David Stover: If you look at the plas- tics problem as a whole, it is estimat- ed that plastic fishing nets account for between 10 and 40 percent of marine pollution caused by old plas- tics. That’s a significant proportion for just a few types of garbage. We at Bureo want to do something about the garbage on the seas and have therefore chosen the fishing nets. So far, there has hardly been any con- sideration of what to do with the nets that can no longer be used. We consider fishing nets to be one of the most harmful forms of plastic waste for the maritime environment. How does Bureo collect the end-of- life fishing nets? Stover: We operate in Chile with our company. There we started to set up large recycling buckets in the Interview with David Stover, co-founder and COO of Bureo ports. A kind of garbage can, where the fishermen could get rid of their old nets. This works in some places where it is well managed. But the situation varies from port to port and from fishing company to fish- ing company. Then we realised that instead of waiting passively for the garbage cans to fill, it was better to actively approach the fisheries. Today we are receiving information from the fisheries as to which nets are old and when they are to be phased out. Does Bureo pay for this? Stover: Yes, because the financial in- centive means that fishermen do not regard the old nets as waste, but as a business opportunity. We pay the fishermen, collect the nets, recycle them and return them to production.