This label is a reflection on the recycling industry as a whole rather than being specifically attributed to Waterhaul's process.

Conventional plastics recycling is water intensive. To turn waste plastic into usable pellets, the industry standard is to wash the material, often through multiple cycles, to strip out salts, sand, fines and biological contamination, then dry it before extrusion. For waste fishing gear in particular, which arrives full of seawater, sediment and marine fouling, the wash stage is significant.

We've spent years developing and validating a new waterless recycling process. Instead of washing the material, we use a dry route built around targeted pre-cleaning, controlled thermal treatment, vacuum devolatilisation and continuous melt filtration. The result is the same: high-grade recycled pellets that UK manufacturers can use. The difference is that we get there without process water, without a wastewater stream, and without the water-stress footprint that comes with conventional recycling.

As far as we're aware, based on our own structured review of academic literature, industry sources and patent records, no other large-scale mechanical recycling process for fishing or aquaculture gear achieves this without a wet wash stage and this therefore makes our process extremely efficient.

The water-intensive activity that the disclosure category exists to flag is, in our case, the specific activity we've actually engineered out.

This label is a reflection on the recycling industry as a whole rather than being specifically attributed to Waterhaul's process.

Recycling is energy intensive in the sense that any industrial process involving heat and machinery uses energy. However, two things are worth knowing.

First, our own direct energy consumption is modest. Waterhaul operates from a small Cornish site and our electricity use reflects that and is from a supplier who uses 100% renewable energy sources.

Second, and more importantly, the bigger picture is that mechanically recycled polypropylene takes a small fraction of the energy required to produce virgin polypropylene from fossil feedstock. Every tonne of our recycled pellet that goes into a manufacturer's product is a tonne of virgin plastic production avoided, along with the oil extraction, cracking and polymerisation that would otherwise sit behind it. The recycling route Waterhaul exists to scale is the lower-energy, lower-emissions option. It is the alternative to it that is genuinely energy intensive.

The waterless process we've developed also removes the energy-intensive wash and dry stages that conventional mechanical recycling relies on, which brings the energy demand of our route lower still.