His first stumbling block came early: he could only find materials on the open market with limited recycled content. “Maybe 18%, maybe 20%,” he says. So he started working with a factory on a polyester made from 100% recycled material.
Since then, Ecoalf has developed its own recycled cotton and recycled wool. They’ve worked with a Taiwanese restaurant chain to collect coffee ground waste, turning it into a nano-powder that’s mixed with either recycled polyester or nylon polymers to create yarn.
They’ve swapped out plastic foam for a biodegradable algae-based alternative for their sneaker soles. And they spent two years developing a method of turning old tyres into new flip-flops. That last one was harder than you might think. Modern tyres are notoriously difficult to recycle, since they contain mixed material including natural and synthetic rubber and steel.
Ecoalf was already using nylon upcycled from abandoned fishing nets when Goyeneche learned the extent of the ocean plastic problem. Fishermen in Northern Spain told him they were pulling out loads of debris along with the nets.
“They are literally catching trash,” he says. “There are plastic bottles, aluminium cans, and not on the surface, it’s in the bottom because every time a bottle doesn’t have a cap it goes to the bottom. The cans sink to the bottom.” The fishermen had been throwing the debris back into the sea.
In 2015, Upcycling the Oceans was born. The project has seen the Ecoalf Foundation work with 3,000 fishermen in 32 ports, collecting more than 300 tons of trash from the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea. In 2016, they extended it to Thailand. You can now buy Ecoalf swimwear that’s been produced with plastic pulled from the seas around Phuket. “We’re not a story-telling company; we’re a story doing company,” says Goyeneche.
Find out what happened when Clare Press spoke to Livia Firth about the Green Carpet Challenge, being an active citizen and her childhood on the Wardrobe Crisis podcast.
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