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 with their initiative of utilising fishing nets to integrate into their smartphones.

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 health of the world’s oceans.

Samsung believes collaboration is crucial to breaking barriers and creating innovations that bring both performance and sustainability. Therefore, Samsung joined forces with likeminded organisations to evolve new capabilities and address the complex challenge of ocean plastic pollution.

Samsung first partnered with Royal DSM, a leading science-based company to gather fishing nets from fishers who collect them along the coastlines of the Indian Ocean. After ensuring collection of 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 collaborates 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 high-performance 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 ocean-bound plastics across all its products. By the end of 2022, Samsung’s use of recycled ocean-bound material could prevent more than 50 tons of discarded fishing nets from entering the world’s oceans.

The Galaxy S22 series marks another step in Samsung’s sustainability journey under Galaxy for the Planet, which aims to unleash the company’s scale, innovation and spirit of open collaboration to deliver tangible climate actions across the MX Business and enable Galaxy users to adopt more sustainable lifestyles. This includes increasing its use of recycled materials, reducing standby power, eliminating single-use plastic from packaging and diverting all waste from landfills by 2025.

Samsung is committed to addressing ocean plastic pollution in a way that will positively impact not only the environment but also the lives of all Galaxy users. This new technological advancement marks a notable achievement in the company’s journey to deliver tangible environmental actions and protect the planet for generations to come.

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In Sri Lanka, Samsung has been recognised as the ‘Most Loved Electronics Brand’ for three consecutive years by Brand Finance Lanka’s review of the country’s most valuable brands. As Sri Lanka’s No.1 smartphone brand, Samsung’s customer base in the country spans across all age groups, particularly the Gen Z and Millennial segments.