Why Collecting Ocean Waste Required Building Factories, Not Just Funding Beach Cleanups

Strategic Geography: Collection Points That Count

Geography matters when you're fighting ocean plastic. Seaqual's collection points aren't randomly scattered across coastlines; they're strategically positioned near the initiative's factories to minimise carbon footprint whilst maximising impact. Currently operational in Mexico, Egypt, Vietnam, and Tunisia, these sites represent more than waste recovery operations—they're experiments in community-centred environmental intervention.

The Tunisian operation on the island of Kerkennah offers perhaps the clearest illustration of Seaqual's methodology. Unlike the other collection points, which built upon existing infrastructure, Kerkennah was conceived from scratch. Devy explains the rationale: "We were seeking to open a new recollection point. And we wanted to create a new one from scratch, tapping into the expertise we got from the previous implementation." The initiative partnered with a group led by Jean-Paul Pelissier, who secured funding for a holistic solution bringing together multiple expertises with local entrepreneurship.

What made the collaboration essential was Seaqual's commercial structure. "Seaqual Initiative was, for this project, indispensable as it was providing the necessary sales structure for this plastic, enabling the recollection point to sell at a higher price than the market, with stability," Devy notes. This pricing philosophy—paying above market rates—runs through all collection points, ensuring communities benefit economically from participation whilst retaining value-added tasks locally rather than exporting them to industrial centres.

The earlier collection points in Spain and Portugal, though no longer operational, provided crucial learning. Europe simply had less plastic to collect, but the experience informed operational aspects like chain of custody protocols and training procedures. Each site presented distinct challenges: beaches in Tunisia versus rivers in other locations, established NGO partnerships versus ground-up community building. These variations became laboratories for refining the model.

The geographical spread follows industrial logic. Seaqual maintains one or two collection points per continent, deliberately positioning them near transformation facilities. For Tunisia, plastic undergoes hot washing and flake generation locally before shipping to Spain for conversion into pellets and yarn. This regional processing reduces transportation emissions whilst retaining value-added processing locally.

The distinction between Seaqual's approach and other ocean plastic initiatives is deliberate. The collection points target genuine marine litter—plastic already in seas and oceans—rather than Ocean Bound Plastic (OBP), which can be collected up to 50 kilometres inland. This focus ensures intervention occurs before plastic fragments into microplastics on the ocean floor.

The network is expanding. Seaqual is exploring partnerships in Senegal, Greece, and Italy, alongside developing a complete supply chain in India and Asia. Each new point must balance collection capacity with community impact, environmental benefit with commercial viability—a calculus that determines whether ocean plastic recovery can scale from proof of concept to global solution.

Transformation and Innovation: From Waste to Worth

Collecting ocean plastic is one challenge; transforming it into commercially viable material is another entirely. Marine litter arrives at Seaqual's facilities degraded, contaminated, and structurally compromised by months or years of saltwater exposure and UV radiation. This reality dictates a fundamental constraint in Seaqual's flagship product: the Seaqual Yarn contains only 10% marine plastic, with the remaining 90% comprising recycled PET from land-based bottles.

Devy is transparent about this limitation, which stems from the mechanical recycling process. "Challenge comes from the mechanical recycling that is difficult to spin afterwards. And we must maintain a high quality for the subsequent steps of the process (knitting, dying, finishing, cut-and-sew, etc...)," he explains. The marine component can't dominate the blend without sacrificing the yarn's performance characteristics—strength, consistency, spinability—that manufacturers require. It's a compromise between environmental ambition and industrial reality, but one Seaqual clearly communicates rather than obscures. 
The remaining degraded material doesn't go to waste: PP from bottle caps enters separate supply chains, HDPE gets upcycled for other applications, and residual material is valorised as energy—ensuring comprehensive utilisation of collected marine litter.

The product range extends well beyond fashion textiles. Seaqual Marine Polymer comes in multiple variants—PET for reusable kitchenware and rigid packaging, HDPE, PP, and PA6 for automotive interiors, electronics casings, and furnishing applications. Seaqual Fiber, blending 20% marine plastic with 80% recycled PET, serves acoustic panels, decorative textiles, and automotive carpets. This diversification into injection moulding and non-textile sectors accelerates collection rates by creating markets for different grades of recovered plastic.

The vertical integration through ANTEX and VICA factories proves crucial here. Owning the transformation infrastructure allows Seaqual to control quality, maintain traceability, and capture value at each processing stage. The chain of custody system tracks material from collection point through hot washing, flake production, pelletisation, and yarn spinning. Every manufacturer purchasing Seaqual yarn must submit fabric samples for verification of minimum composition requirements. The yarn also carries Global Recycling Standard (GRS) certification, providing independent validation of its 100% recycled content.
Environmental metrics underscore the efficiency gains from this integrated model. Seaqual's transformation process achieves 37% reduction in CO2 emissions, 34% reduction in water consumption, and 40% reduction in energy use.

Chemical recycling represents the next frontier. Seaqual has completed several batches using this technology, which breaks plastic down to monomers and enables true textile-to-textile (T2T) recycling. The new Seaqual Yarn T2T contains 90% chemically recycled textiles and 10% marine plastic—a formula that keeps land-based PET bottles in bottle-to-bottle loops rather than diverting them to textiles. Chemical recycling also allows higher marine plastic percentages since the material returns to molecular building blocks. However, Devy notes they're "checking with the market the price level as this is one of the main drivers of this industry."

Another innovation on the horizon is Seaqual Nylon Yarn, made from PA6 sourced from fishing nets collected in the Mediterranean near Barcelona. Designed for women's swimwear, wetsuits, and applications requiring high strength and elasticity, it represents a targeted solution for a specific waste stream plaguing European waters.

Closing the Loop: Brands, Barriers, and Beyond

Seaqual's licensing model now connects 1,500 manufacturers and brands, creating a community bound by contractual obligations that extend beyond purchasing yarn. Every licensee must sign the Seaqual Licence, which mandates traceability reporting, composition verification, and adherence to approved marketing guidelines. It's a framework designed to prevent greenwashing—ensuring brands communicate accurately about marine plastic content rather than inflating environmental claims.

Beyond yarn purchases, the Seaqual Foundation offers structured corporate engagement through tiered memberships and cleanup programmes. Companies can support ocean regeneration through annual sales pledges, product-linked contributions, or organising beach cleanups that combine waste collection with team engagement. These cleanup events, priced from €35 per participant, can include educational workshops, ocean talks with scientists and artists, and visual content creation—turning corporate responsibility into tangible community action whilst generating tax-deductible impact.

The collaboration experience varies dramatically by company size. Small and medium brands prove more receptive to Seaqual's eco-conception guidelines, which push for garments designed as 100% recyclable from the outset. "It is obviously easier to collaborate hands in hands with small and medium brands which are more inclined to adopt our guidelines as they are starting from scratch," Devy observes. Larger corporations present different challenges: "Bigger brands have a lot of inertia and current processes which makes it more difficult to implement our processes in order for the final garment to be 100% recyclable."

This push for recyclability addresses a critical gap in the circular economy. Seaqual's yarn is 100% recycled but "doesn't come necessarily with biodegradable features." Instead, the focus is end-of-life recovery. The initiative offers closed-loop options through chemical recycling, provided the final application is 100% monomaterial polyester. Seaqual encourages manufacturers to use dope dyeing, incorporate antimicrobial properties into yarn rather than finishing treatments, and make design choices that facilitate disassembly and recycling. The vision is garments that return to Seaqual for conversion back into yarn—an infinite loop rather than a linear path to landfill.

Consumer education operates on multiple fronts. The Seaqual website hosts scientific articles and profiles of "heroes"—scientists, artists, and sports personalities who share their experiences with ocean health and the impact of plastic pollution. European collection events bring these voices directly to local populations, combining physical cleanup activities with expert insights that transform abstract environmental data into relatable human narratives. Marketing materials—logos, stamps, photos, videos, roll-ups, posters—are provided to licensees through a brand site, ensuring consistent messaging. This infrastructure serves dual purposes: supporting brand communication needs and amplifying the microplastics message to end consumers who might otherwise remain disconnected from ocean degradation.

The transparency mandate runs deep. Seaqual clearly communicates the material composition limitations stemming from degradation. The chain of custody traces plastic from specific collection locations through every transformation stage. This openness, Devy suggests, sits "in the DNA of Seaqual Initiative. We are very clear on what we are doing, transforming." It's a deliberate counter to an industry often criticised for opacity and exaggerated environmental claims.

Looking forward, the Seaqual Foundation will add layers of education and community defence, formalising the social dimension of collection points. The ambition is scaling—more collection points, expanded product applications, accelerated recovery rates. Whether ocean plastic recovery becomes a global solution or remains a niche initiative depends on navigating the tension between environmental imperative and market economics, a balance Seaqual continues to recalibrate with each new partnership and collection point.