New EUR 10 million ghost gear recycling plant opens in Maastricht

Ghost gear pollution is a huge problem and a major contributor to the ocean plastics crisis in every major body of water in the world. Ghost gear, which includes the tangles of discarded or lost ropes and fishing nets found washed up on reefs or drifting in the open sea, forms hazardous, nearly invisible traps that injure and kill marine life.
An estimated 640,000 tonnes of ghost gear enters the ocean every year, and now constitutes some 10% of the plastic waste in the oceans.
In 2020, Dutch entrepreneur Marcel Alberts, who had many years of experience in the field of high performance synthetic fibres decided that it was time to tackle the problem. His idea was to establish a recycling facility that would be able to process and recycle marine plastic into new products. To that end, a new company - Healix  - was founded in 2020, in Maastricht and construction commenced on a factory to shred, wash and reprocess used twines, ropes, nets, and other plastic fiber waste from farming and fishing into pristine circular polymers for the global manufacturing supply chain.
Now, less than two years later, the plant was taken into operation during a formal inauguration ceremony attended by Vice President of the European Commission and Chief Officer for the Green Deal, Frans Timmermans.
The new facility has an annual capacity of 6,000 metric tons of polypropylene and high density polyethylene, saving almost 10,000 metrics tons of CO2 emissions per year. Input waste consists of abandoned plastic fibre materials procured from national collection centres and includes fishing nets, packaging products such as big bags, ropes, tear-resistant yarn and fibre-based materials from the agricultural industry.

Healix’ newly constructed production halls are fully equipped with modern recycling technology including a Weima W5.22 single-shaft shredder with a working width of 2,200 mm and featuring a powerful hydraulic drive from Hägglunds Bosch Rexroth - a steel colossus weighing just under 12 tonnes, which is used for the first shredding step.
Alberts opted for the W5.22 because it ‘all starts with the shredder.’ “If it isn't robust and reliable, all the subsequent production steps suffer,” he said.
Over EUR 10 million in funding for the project was secured through a seed financing round completed beginning of September. The seed funding round was led by private equity firm Active Capital Company and facilitated by ABN AMRO Asset Based Finance and the Netherlands Enterprise Agency (“RVO”). Other investors, including high-performance fibre supplier FibrXL and Tama, the market leader in crop baling solutions, also participated. FibrXL, a portfolio company of Active Capital Company, is a converter and distributor of high-performance fibers, such as Dyneema, Twaron, Technora, Vectran, and Zylon and distributor of industrial yarns such as Polyester, Polyamide, and Viscose in Europe, Africa, and the Americas.