Collection: Women's ECOALF

Javier Goyeneche sold his first fashion company and in 2009 founded a brand that was not to consume new natural resources. He named it after his son Alfred: Ecoalf. But the recycled materials of the day were poor, so he started at the very foundation — the fibre — and developed his own with partners. The turning point came at the end of 2014, when fishermen told him how much waste gets tangled in their nets every time they go out. He went to see for himself and was shocked. The company had five people at the time, yet he persuaded three fishermen from the port of Villajoyosa to put a container on their boat and bring the waste ashore instead of throwing it back into the sea. That is how the Upcycling the Oceans project was born. Three fishermen have since become an army: around five thousand fishermen in dozens of Mediterranean ports, over two thousand tonnes of waste pulled from the seabed since 2015, and a project stretching from Spain through Italy and Greece to Thailand. The recovered plastic is turned into yarn, and from it Ecoalf sews jackets, shoes and bags whose recycled origin you would never guess — which was the point from the start: recycling must not look like a sacrifice. In 2018, Ecoalf became the first Spanish fashion company to earn B Corp certification. The brand's slogan says the rest: Because there is no Planet B. A jacket as proof that waste is just raw material in the wrong place.