Econyl Recycled Old Fishing Nets Into Swimwear

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Finding the perfect swimwear can be a more difficult task, There is so much to think about cut, coverage, colour, sustainability, where and what your swimwear is made from etc. The good news is that a growing number of brands launching collections using a game-changing yarn, Econyl, which transforms fishing nets and marine waste into a high-quality textile that you can wear many times and there is no compromise on style.

Swimwear brands that use post-consumer recycled fabric are gaining lot of attention. Davy J has swimsuits for wild and sporting swimmers. Auria London has dressed Daisy Lowe and Rihanna.  Ruby Moon offers “activewear for activists”. Fisch is stocked at Matches. Mara Hoffman’s pieces sell for hundreds of pounds. But follow the stories of all these labels and you will arrive in the same place at Econyl, a recycled nylon fiber that its Italian manufacturer claims is “infinitely recyclable”.

 “At the beginning, many people were laughing at me,” says Giulio Bonazzi, CEO of Econyl’s parent company, Aquafil. An average of 64,000 tonnes of fishing nets are left in the ocean each year, and these were the first nylon items that Bonazzi’s company collected for recycling, initially from the fish farming industry in Scotland and Norway, from professional divers who spotted ghost nets, and now from “all over the world – Japan, Australia, south-east Asia, north and South America”.

Lejeune says that, when she started the Ethical Fashion Forum in 2006, plastic as an issue was not on her radar. “That has really changed in the past two years.” There is an obvious and pleasing circularity to the idea of swimmers bathing in recycled ocean waste. No wonder small fashion brands are not the only ones to love Econyl. Gucci adopted the fiber in 2017. Stella McCartney has pledged to stop using virgin nylon by 2020, switching to Econyl (she makes bags with it, too.)

The company now has more than 750 fashion clients and “demand is growing strongly day by day”, Bonazzi says. He has his sights set on the plastic industry at large – “glasses, furniture, chairs”, he rattles off – and even nets in which to transport and sell supermarket fruit.