Trash to treasure: Victoria fashion brand makes use of ocean plastic waste

There’s no question ocean plastic has become a major problem in Island waters and worldwide— microplastics have been found throughout the Salish Sea food chain, the Pacific Garbage Patch continues to grow, and there have been hundreds of reports of sea lions entangled in plastic on BC’s coast.

While work has been done to get plastic out of the ocean, where it ends up after removal continues to be a problem without a solution. This is the issue that Victoria clothing brand ANIÁN looks to address in its partnership with the Ocean Legacy Foundation, a non-profit that removes plastic from the ocean. They’ve teamed up to create buttons made entirely of recycled oyster trays found in the Salish Sea.

The partnership began when ANIÁN founder Paul Long and Ocean Legacy’s co-founder Chloé Dubois began to discuss how ocean waste could be utilized in clothing. Could ghost nets be made into shopping bags? Fishing lines into thread?

They found that not every material was suited to a new life in textiles, but black plastic oyster trays, used to grow oysters for easy retrieval, were an ideal replacement for virgin plastics typically used to make buttons.

The trays were collected from Baynes Sound, the strip of water between Denman and Vancouver Island.

Last summer, roughly 70 shellfish trays were found scattered across a Denman Island beach. The trays had no identification tags connecting them to an owner, contrary to a DFO regulation implemented months previously that all shellfish growers must identify their equipment.

This incident, plus other accidental equipment losses, led Ocean Legacy to pull  an abundance of trays from Bayes Sound that will now get a second life.

ANIÁN is dedicated to circular fashion—a concept that aims to keep products and materials in use for as long as possible. This approach is one way to address another waste conundrum—the immense amount of clothing that winds up in landfills each year.

The brand has already committed to using 100% recycled wool and cotton pulled from landfills to make its signature shirts, and Long said they continue to look at ways to innovate with recycled materials. He hopes showing how these materials are given new life will get people thinking about how clothing is made.

“You know, when you go out and you purchase a button, you don't actually think about the complex supply chain or solutions or problems that have arisen with it,” Long says. “You just see a button.”

Previously, ANIÁN’s shirt buttons were mostly made from recycled nylon, but being an Island-based company, Long wanted to create an alternative using materials “that wash up on our shores,” worrying that those plastics just pile up.

“If we don't have a use for it, it just goes from a beach to a storage facility,” he says  “So we're just sort of moving it from one pile to the other, which is good, because it's getting out of the oceans. But we definitely need to find the next step.”

Long says while Ocean Legacy looks to remove items from the ocean, innovation is needed to figure out where those materials go next, which he says has made his work with the non-profit an exciting endeavor.

Creativity, he says, is key to finding new uses for waste materials. Last year, the brand turned discarded parachutes into lining for coats, saying it’s all about “being aware of our environment.”

“You know, what is in our everyday lives and what is in every person's industry that they're like, man, something pretty cool [could be made] out of that,” he says.

Long and Dubois continue to brainstorm new ideas for ocean plastic recycling and Long says he expects future collaborations will have the same local aspect, with Dubois focusing her work on cleaning the Salish Sea. While they launch their new buttons, they’ll be keeping an eye on what washes ashore.