In Conversation With Finisterre’s Full Time Wetsuit Recycler

Globally, 350 tonnes of old neoprene lies around unused every year, probably headed for landfill. There are 500,000 surfers in the UK alone replacing their wetsuits approximately every two years, and surfing makes up only a small percentage of the wider watersports (and wetsuit) industry. Generally derived from non-renewable sources, and currently very difficult to recycle, neoprene waste is a huge environmental problem.

Whilst there have been some good ideas around the re-use of wetsuits including mouse and yoga mats, these ideas don’t really address closing the loop on wetsuit manufacturing and that’s where we’re focusing our efforts. It is genuinely pioneering as we don’t know where it will end; we know there is a problem and we believe in using innovation to provide solutions to create more sustainable products. I’m going to be working side by side with founder Tom Kay, who got the programme off the ground and for whom this is a cause close to his heart.

This role is really important to Finisterre because we are committed to our founding pillars; to product, to the environment, and to people, with every product we produce. We invested in a whole winter of testing before we launched our first wetsuit so we could gather field tester feedback and make the best suit possible. The suit has met its design brief – warmth and durability, but now we’re ready to take on the next challenge - looking at the recyclability of wetsuits.

Very simply, circular manufacturing just means that the materials (and resources) that make up a product can be disassembled and where necessary, reprocessed, to provide the raw materials for that product to be made again. Ideally, this cycle of materials can happen over and over again and zero material waste is therefore produced.

This process itself is often not challenging but the disassembly of materials within a product – particularly something as complex as a wetsuit – is often not easy and therefore not cost-effective and viable to do.

I’m full time at Finisterre but split my time between the Wheal Kitty Workshops and Exeter University. It’s a great partnership because we’re bringing together design innovation, science and engineering and commercial know-how to design for sustainability. We really believe these three elements are vital in tackling this environmental problem.

We’ve got a strong relationship with the University of Exeter and are already working closely with Professor Oana Ghita and Paul McCutchion who work as part of the CALMARE (Centre for Alternative Materials and Re-manufacturing) research department at the University. Oana and Paul both have a huge amount of technical knowledge and experience of material recycling, having worked with many UK businesses to develop re-manufacturing processes and products.

We also have incredible access to the engineering labs at the University which is where we’ll be carrying out our material testing and building our wetsuit-specific test equipment.

Yes, it’s a huge task but one to which we are committed. Our first job is to fully understand what Finisterre’s own wetsuits endure on a material level and identify what is specifically causing, say, the stiffening of wetsuits over time. We are also going to be able to assess the condition of every component of our wetsuits after 1, 2 and 3 years of use, which will help us to identify whether our wetsuits have an optimum shelf-life for recycling.

Once we know how neoprene’s properties change over time within our own wetsuits, we can re-imagine them and think about designing for recyclability. No seams, modular, removable linings…all focused on building a suit that can be recycled at the end of its life.

Following on from this, we can start to look at the levels of neoprene degradation in other wetsuits and which ones can be recycled to what level. It would be a huge step to discover a method of neoprene recycling that we could make available to the wider industry.