Episode 71 Rob Thompson – scaling up circular marine plastic solutions

When we first interviewed Rob Thompson of Odyssey Innovation in 2020, we heard how he’d been involved in lots of beach clean ups around the south west tip of the UK, where he lived.

You probably already know that waste plastic is in all of our oceans and seas, and some of it washes up on beaches. It’s packaging, it is from the fishing boats and it’s other plastic waste.

Back in Episode 39, Rob told us how he’d been puzzling with how to solve the beach and marine plastics issue, and realised there were three key problems:

• First, How to cover the inaccessible coves, estuaries and other areas that regular beach cleaners couldn’t get to;
• Secondly, How to dispose of the plastic collected from the clean-up operations;
• Finally – and critically – How to pay for the running costs of doing everything.

Out of that set of problems, Rob founded Odyssey Innovation, which collects and recycles marine plastic into kayaks and other products.

Since then, Rob’s been working on how to expand this to help the fishing industry recycle more of their end-of-use nets and other plastics. He’d already come up with a solution that could apply to other areas of the UK – but how would he make it all work practically at a much bigger scale?

Rob tells us about The Net Regeneration Scheme, which is the 3^rd project to be officially endorsed by the Global Ghost Gear Initiative (GGGI)

Rob explains some of the challenges involved in expanding the scheme, tells us more about the complexities of the materials they’re collecting, how they’ve set up recycling solutions for the easy and difficult-to-recycle materials, and how they’ve developed an exciting new product made from the recycled marine plastics.