‘When I pass piles of fishing nets, I see piles of money’: a one man recycling revolution on the Cornish coast

Determined to find a solution to the discarded plastic nets, Ian Falconer found a way to convert them into filament for 3D printing, for use in products from motorbikes to sunglasses

Ian Falconer kept thinking about the heaps of discarded plastic fishing nets he saw at Newlyn harbour near his home in Cornwall. I thought it's such a waste'," he says. There has to be a better solution than it all going into landfill."

Falconer, 52, who studied environmental and mining geology at university, came up with a plan: shredding and cleaning the worn out nets, melting the plastic down and converting it into filament to be used in 3D printing. He then built a micro-factory" so that the filament could be made into useful stuff.