Fishing communities are unique, every single one of them.
They are different because the sea is their focus, not the land and that means that many of their members see the world differently to the land-facing majority.
In Cornwall the three threads of age-old community life are land, sea and mine with each individual community living side by side, working together and dealing with the challenges that come with living on an isolated penninsular that sticks out into the Atlantic Ocean. It should be no shock that the motto on our home county’s flag in the Cornish language is ‘Onan hag Oll’ which in English means ‘One and All’.
Understanding and accepting that the local environment provides a local challenge that results in cultures that pervade the parts of economic activity we aspire to serve is essential as we take our solutions out into the world.
That all might sound a bit wooly but the local fishing culture stretches into fishing gear design and the hardware that fishers use, so it has a direct impact on what we can do and where.
Dropping our containerised recycling units into coastal communities around the world, like a flying saucer, and expecting those communities to work with them would be an ignorant approach and potentially destructive to shareholder value, as well as the local environment.
So we don’t work like that. We try to understand the fishing industry at a micro, meso and macro level, understanding person-to-person, community-to-community and economy-to-economy. Only by doing so can we bridge the gaps that currently exist between the source of the nets we recycle and the end customer for the materials we produce. Those gaps are why most of the world’s nylon monofilament nets aren’t currenty recycled.