It all started in Athens from the collaboration between MEDASSETHealthy Seas and the fashion department of AKTO College of Art and Design. A sustainable fashion contest among young designers was created. They had to create a style made with fabric containing ECONYL® regenerated yarn also taking inspiration from the whole story of waste and spent nets recovery.

Healthy Seas is in fact an initiative founded by two businesses (Aquafil and Star Sock) and a European NGO (ECNC Land & Sea Group) that have joined forces to recover ghost nets from the seas and regenerate them with the ECONYL® process into first quality nylon yarn for textiles and carpets.

The award ceremony for the sustainable fashion contest was followed by a fashion exhibition in a mall in Athens where it was possible to admire all the garments created by young designers. This exhibition has now been moved to CretAquarium (Crete), one of the biggest and most modern aquariums in Europe where it will be until September. After that, it should be moving around Europe, and we hope to see it in the Netherlands and maybe soon also in Slovenia where the ECONYL® regeneration plant is located.

Visitors to the aquarium will have the opportunity to enjoy a unique exhibition that demonstrates what can happen when environmental awareness, fashion, and the principles of the circular economy meet.

The exhibition was created with the support of the Representation of the EC in Greece, on the occasion of MEDASSET’s first anniversary as coordinator in Greece of the European initiative: “Healthy Seas: A Journey from Waste to Wear”.

In these days, the second winner of the MEDASSET sustainable fashion contest will be visiting our ECONYL® plant in Ajdovsicina and Ljubljana so we might soon share bits of our conversations with him and his experience in discovering the regeneration process. Stay tuned!

For a few articles about the Crete event, have a look at our Press section on the website.

Pictures below are by: Akis Mavrakis