By the year 2020, experts forecast that fibre consumption in the textile industry will increase by 30% and that the environmental impact will consequently grow. A carpet manufacturer Carpet Concept has collaborated with a leading Italy based polyamide 6 producer Aquafil to manufacture part of its product range with environmentally friendly alternative yarns.

The company hopes that with products, which are made of old fishing nets recovered from the seas, produced at its Thuringian factory, it contributes towards providing a qualified ecological response for the future.

Raw material

The raw material for the yarn comes from old fishing nets, which meander in the oceans. There they pose, just like plastic waste, a considerable threat to sea creatures. Frequently, marine biologists find whales, marine turtles and fish which are entangled in the disposed threads and die in agony.

Since 2011, fishing nets have been successively collected and a worldwide collection network has been established. Currently, divers retrieve the abandoned nets in the Baltic Sea, the North Sea and the Mediterranean, thereby cooperating with the organisation Healthy Seas.

In a regeneration system developed by the Aquafil, the nylon material is recovered from the recycled fishing nets, as well as from textile waste or old carpets made of polyamide 6, and processed into yarn.

Econyl yarn

According to Aquafil, from every tonne of waste collected in the seas about 1,000 square metres of carpet can be produced. The production of 10,000 tonnes of Econyl is also said to eliminate more than the same amount of waste and save more than 42,000 tonnes of CO2, according to data provided by Aquafil.

Four international universities were involved in the development of this process. It was first used in 2011, after more than four years of research. In 2014, Aquafil won the National German Sustainability Award for resource efficiency.

The fishing nets are pre-processed in Ljubljana and are further recycled into intermediate products of yarn. On the looms of the Thuringian carpet factory, the produced Econyl yarn is finally processed into sustainable carpets – manually checked for quality and supplied all over the world. The demand for “yarn from the oceans” is increasing, the company reports.

The Econyl yarn was recognised by being included on the material list for environmentally friendly construction for the attainment of LEED credits (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design).

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