“Transforming Plastic From Our Coastline Into Purposeful Products That Inspire Action. ” 

We’d love to hear the Waterhaul origin story, could you share the motivation behind starting the brand?

Before Waterhaul, I was working at the marine conservation charity Surfers Against Sewage. The origin came from frustration; we knew from the citizen science programs that I was developing that ghost gear (lost, discarded or abandoned fishing gear) was the No. 1 form of marine plastic pollution that this incredible network of over 100,000 beach cleaners was tackling. This echoed my own personal experiences here exploring, diving and surfing on the Cornish coastline. This, combined with the knowledge that this was the most harmful form of plastic to marine life, yet little to no action was being taken from the top-down to change it, drove the ambition to find a solution to all of this plastic fishing gear that I was collecting.

Where did your product development journey start?

I established early on that sunglasses and eyewear frames would be the ultimate product, if I could make it happen. They would be a product that could utilise and showcase the true performance potential of this plastic – I wanted to harness ghost gear’s incredible strength towards a new purpose.

They’d also be something that you’d really value (and would continue to use for a lifetime) to challenge the perception of this plastic as ‘waste’ and be purposeful, and play a role in people’s connection with adventure and the ocean.

Finally, a key motivator was the dissatisfaction with the existing options. Living a life surrounded by sand and salt meant the plastic lenses that made up the vast majority of sunglasses on the market had a short lifespan with no end of life solution. Yet, the mineral glass lenses that could endure such conditions were only offered by high-end brands, often costing upwards of £250. There was a clear chance to blend sustainable design, functionality, and practicality to introduce a product that was both affordable and met a need — a product we desired but had yet to find.

Circular Design can be a big challenge for a new business because so many elements are new. How are you building circularity into your business model?

By developing the process to recycle ghost gear into glasses, we’d also developed the solution to recycle our end-of-life frames: back into the next batch and into new frames (this was the fate of many early prototypes too!). The key however was developing a system that would ensure this would actually happen in practice. For us, this took the form of a lifetime warranty. By offering this, we provided an incentive for any damaged frames to be returned back to us so they could enter this circular loop rather than enter landfill. To this day, the circularity is still unique – whilst some other brands offer end-of-life recycling into a lower quality waste stream (ie. Downcycling), we’re not aware of any other brands who can turn frames back into frames.

We also crucially don’t exclude our lenses from our focus here too; glass is an infinitely recyclable material. Conventional plastic lenses are made from polymers incompatible with conventional recycling waste streams and so have no end-of-life solution.