S2. Ep.9 - The Wetsuit Waste Problem (And Who's Fixing It) with Circular Flow
Clean Sailors podcast · Clean Sailors
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Show Notes
For most of us around the world, wetsuits are a necessity to getting out on and staying in or under the water. There’s an emotional element too - these slippery suits allow us to spend hundreds of hours doing what we love - our pleasures and past times - surfing, supping, diving, snorkelling, foiling, kiting, body-boarding and sailing.
But like many modern textiles, neoprene doesn’t come with an easy end-of-life solution.
Our old wetsuits are rarely recycled, often burned or ending up in landfill.
So what happens when someone decides that isn’t good enough?
Let’s speak with Emma and Peter from Circular Flow — a team working to crack one of the watersports industry’s toughest waste problems by collecting, recycling, and re-using old wetsuits with the aim of creating a genuinely circular material.
In this episode, we’ll dig into why neoprene has traditionally been so hard to deal with, what it takes to build a closed-loop system, and how we, us sailors, surfers, divers etc, can get involved.