Samsung reiterates its commitment to marine protection on World Ocean Day
Samsung, Sri Lanka’s No. 1 smartphone brand, reiterated its commitment to preserve marine life. 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 world’s oceans.
Samsung believes collaboration is crucial to breaking barriers and creating innovations that bring both performance and sustainability. They joined forces with likeminded organisations to evolve new capabilities and address the complex challenge of ocean plastic pollution.
Samsung first partnered with Royal DSM, to gather fishing nets from fishers who collect them along the coastlines of the Indian Ocean. After collecting 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 collaborated with Hanwha Compound, a polymer compounding company, to optimise the material’s performance to match the company’s high-quality standards for smartphone technology. The material is transformed into highperformance 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.
This is only the beginning. Samsung is committed to evolving and expanding its use of oceanbound plastics across all its products. By the end of 2022, Samsung’s use of recycled ocean-bound material could prevent more than 50 tonnes of discarded fishing nets from entering the oceans.