Galaxy’s Purposeful Innovation With Discarded Fishing Nets

Over the last decade, Samsung Electronics has worked to reimagine product design and development to do more with less when it comes to the planet’s natural resources. Samsung’s latest step in this mission was the recent creation of a Galaxy technology that repurposes one of the world’s main sources of plastic waste — discarded fishing nets.

Discarded fishing nets pose serious threats to marine life and natural ecosystems, often ending up in people’s food and water sources. Due to long-term exposure to seawater and UV rays, fishing net material is fragile, making the nets difficult to upcycle directly. To find a solution, Samsung created a material that maintains the quality of its smartphones while preserving the health of the world’s oceans.

How It Works

Samsung believes collaboration is crucial to breaking barriers and creating innovations that bring both performance and sustainability. Therefore, Samsung joined forces with likeminded organizations to evolve new capabilities and address the complex challenge of ocean plastic pollution.

Samsung first partnered with Royal DSM, a leading science-based company to gather fishing nets from fishers who collect them along the coastlines of the Indian Ocean. After ensuring collection of the nets, the company separates, cuts, cleans and extrudes them to develop an eco-conscious material, which consists of a minimum of 80% recycled polyamide, or nylon.

Samsung then collaborates with Hanwha Compound, a polymer compounding company to optimize the material’s performance to match the company’s high-quality standards for smartphone technology. The material is transformed into high-performance polyamide resins that are constructed with a minimum of 20% repurposed fishing nets.

Now ready for use in mobile technology, Samsung incorporated these upcycled polyamide resins into key components of the Galaxy S22 series’ key bracket and inner cover of the S Pen.