Cornish start-up lands big customers by recycling fishing nets

Every year more than one million tonnes of fishing equipment is discarded or lost in the world’s oceans, killing marine life and damaging coral reefs. Millions more fishing nets are burnt or thrown into landfill. Most are made from non-recycled nylon and producing this plastic generates two million tonnes of CO₂ equivalent emissions each year. It is a polluting cycle.
One Cornish start-up, Fishy Filaments, is building a solution to part of the problem at its prototype recycling plant in Newlyn harbour and has caught the attention of car companies including Ford and Mercedes-Benz.
Fishy Filaments, founded in 2016, claims to have created a world-first, chemical-free process that can deep-clean and recycle smaller commercial fishing nets into “engineering-grade nylon” for use in 3D printing.
The company says its process, which involves transforming the shape and size of particles to make cleaning more efficient, has minimal environmental impact as its only output is dirty water and 3 per cent of input net material. The recycled nylon it produces is high enough quality to use in 3D printing for car parts, an attractive proposition for manufacturers looking to reduce their carbon footprints.
Ian Falconer, 50, founder and chief executive of Fishy Filaments, is a mining and mineral processing expert. He says he always wanted to work in sustainability, but after graduating with a geology degree could only find relevant jobs in the oil and gas sector.
He launched his first start-up in 2013, aiming to develop environmentally sustainable metals powders to use in 3D printing. He closed the business in 2016 after realising he could not prove the model, but looked to repurpose his materials recycling research. He initially looked into the plastic packaging recycling sector, but wrote it off as too competitive for a tiny start-up to enter.
“Living in Cornwall there’s only one other really big source of waste plastics: the fishing industry,” he said. “It really was a matter of weeks between making that decision [to try using nets as a source material] and getting my hands on some fishing nets and starting to do some tests.”
Falconer went down to Newlyn harbour and “chased the harbour master around” to explain his idea. Within months, he had demonstrated that he could transform a net into “a very basic” 3D printing filament and launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise £5,000 to buy his first piece of equipment.
Today Fishy Filaments has an agreement with the Cornish hake fleet that entails boats donating their end-of-life nets. Falconer and his three-person team, including a lead full-time engineer, clean and shred the nets into pellets at their pilot plant using the company’s proprietary process.
Falconer was initially unsure if there would be a market for his recycled nylon, but said manufacturers were soon calling about launching trial collaborations.
Inquiries came from Ford and Mercedes-Benz about “compounding” test projects, Falconer said, and from Philips Lighting, which released an award-winning line of sustainable lamps using 3D printed Fishy Filaments nylon in 2022. Falconer puts the interest down to word getting around in the sector about the unique material.
“No recycled nylon material had ever been brought to the 3D printing market before, let alone one made from old fishing nets,” he said. “Ford came to us in 2019; it was actually a bit early for us… [Corporations] come and find us, so we know the material is in demand.
“The feedback we’ve got from them at all levels is, ‘We love the raw material; we’d like more of it’.”
Fishy Filaments is now seeking money to try to scale to meet the demand. The loss-making company has raised nearly £1 million through crowdfunding campaigns, grants from Cornwall council, government-backed loans and research tax credits. It has also turned over £100,000 through collaborations and serving customers, including the Czech 3D filament specialist Fillamentum.
This month it launched a £100,000 crowdfund to fund a commercial plant with a 20-tonne per year capacity. The capital will also be used to deliver the company’s latest nylon powder for use in selective laser-sintering (SLS) 3D printing. The crowdfund has secured more than £114,000 ahead of its August 30 closing date.
“The equipment we’re building now will see capacity go from around 30 kilos a day to about 30 kilos an hour,” Falconer said.
He chose to crowdfund again after being turned down by multiple venture capital investors. “I spent a year trying to engage with VC funds… Almost all of them said: ‘Come back to us when you need £5 million, not half a million’.” He plans to pitch again once “the hardware is ready to rock and roll”.
As it looks to grow, Fishy Filaments will have to compete with rivals in the recycling sector for sources of old nets. One Italian company, Aquafil, pays fishing crews around the UK for nets to use in combination with recycled carpets to make Econyl, another nylon fibre. Econyl is used to make clothes and recycled nets.
Falconer is confident in his sourcing potential. Longer-term, Fishy Filaments plans to scale up its input — and reduce the number of nets going to landfill — through selling automated versions of its recycling plants to harbours around the world. In these locations, the company or local governments would pay fishermen to donate their nets as an incentive. As Falconer puts it, his aim is “to build something unambiguously good”.