B Corp™
Waterhaul is now B Corp Certified, making us part of a global movement working to benefit people and the planet.
What is a B Corp?
Certified B Corporations™, or B Corps™, are companies verified as meeting standards for social and environmental performance, transparency, and accountability.
What does the “B” stand for?
B stands for “benefit”—for people and the planet, not just shareholders.
Overall B Impact Score
- 115.4 points - Waterhaul's Overall B Impact Score
- 80 points - The qualifying threshold for B Corp Certification
- 50.9 points - The Average (Median) Score for Ordinary Businesses
Breaking down our score
Based on the B Impact assessment, Waterhaul Ltd earned an overall score of 115.4. The median score for ordinary businesses who complete the assessment is currently 50.9.
Governance: 18.1
Strong governance ensures our mission remains at the heart of every decision we make and is where we've locked our purpose in for good.
Over half of our score here comes from Mission Lock: as part of certification, we formally amended Waterhaul's governing documents to mean we are legally committed to consider the impact of our decisions on people and the planet, alongside profit.
The rest of the score reflects the everyday discipline behind that promise: a Board that includes an independent, non-executive member and reviews our social and environmental performance; a written Code of Ethics and whistleblower policy; externally reviewed financials; and public transparency around our ownership, our finances and our impact.
Workers: 17.7
Our small Cornwall-based team is central to our mission.
We are committed to providing a safe, supportive and rewarding workplace, investing in employee wellbeing, professional development and engagement.
Our Workers score, particularly in Health, Wellness & Saftey, as well as our Employee Satisfaction surveys, reflect the steps we take to build a positive workplace where people can grow while contributing to meaningful environmental impact.
Financial Security and Career Development are the areas with the most room to grow, and something we're actively working on as the business scales.
Community: 20.2
Community is about who we work with, and how fairly we work with them. We have always believed that creating positive impact extends beyond our products and our score here reflects a business that is rooted in its community.
We work closely with coastal communities, local fishers, responsible suppliers and like-minded organisations to support cleaner oceans and stronger local economies.
Our Community score also recognises our approach to ethical supply chain management, civic engagement, charitable initiatives, and our commitment to building an inclusive and responsible business beyond its core mission.
Environment: 51.6
The environment is where Waterhaul has its greatest impact, accounting for nearly half of our total score.
We exist to transform ghost fishing gear and marine plastics from the UK coastline into Traceable Marine Plastic polymers and purposeful products built for adventure. As far as we know, we're the first UK-based company offering fully traceable recycled plastic pellets produced from 100% recovered fishing gear and marine plastic at scale.
Our score reflects both the environmental management of our operations and the positive impact created through this circular business model. More than half of the score comes from a single area: Resource Conservation, which recognises that our entire business model, not just our operations, is built around keeping material in circulation and out of the environment or landfill, whilst at the same time reducing demand for the use of virgin plastics.
Customers: 7.6
Customers is our smallest pillar in absolute points, but proportionally one of our strongest: a large share of the score comes from what B Lab calls an Impact Business Model bonus, which recognises that our work directly improves outcomes for the organisations we serve, not just the individual customers who buy our impactful products.
Every Waterhaul product is designed to make a positive difference. However, alongside our consumer products, we run a consultancy service helping organisations, including international NGOs, move away from landfilling end-of-life fishing gear and towards recycling it instead.
The rest of the score reflects the basics done properly: transparent data privacy practices, formal quality control, and responsive customer service.
It's in our DNA
Becoming B Corp certified is a huge milestone for Waterhaul, and something we are very proud of, but impact has been our focus since our founding in 2019.
Becoming certified is recognition of this, and as a B Corp in the materials recovery & recycling industry, we’re counted among businesses that are leading a global movement for an inclusive, equitable, and regenerative economy.
B-Corp FAQs
This label is a reflection on the recycling industry as a whole rather than being specifically attributed to Waterhaul's process.
Conventional plastics recycling is water intensive. To turn waste plastic into usable pellets, the industry standard is to wash the material, often through multiple cycles, to strip out salts, sand, fines and biological contamination, then dry it before extrusion. For waste fishing gear in particular, which arrives full of seawater, sediment and marine fouling, the wash stage is significant.
We've spent years developing and validating a new waterless recycling process. Instead of washing the material, we use a dry route built around targeted pre-cleaning, controlled thermal treatment, vacuum devolatilisation and continuous melt filtration. The result is the same: high-grade recycled pellets that UK manufacturers can use. The difference is that we get there without process water, without a wastewater stream, and without the water-stress footprint that comes with conventional recycling.
As far as we're aware, based on our own structured review of academic literature, industry sources and patent records, no other large-scale mechanical recycling process for fishing or aquaculture gear achieves this without a wet wash stage and this therefore makes our process extremely efficient.
The water-intensive activity that the disclosure category exists to flag is, in our case, the specific activity we've actually engineered out.
This label is a reflection on the recycling industry as a whole rather than being specifically attributed to Waterhaul's process.
Recycling is energy intensive in the sense that any industrial process involving heat and machinery uses energy. However, two things are worth knowing.
First, our own direct energy consumption is modest. Waterhaul operates from a small Cornish site and our electricity use reflects that and is from a supplier who uses 100% renewable energy sources.
Second, and more importantly, the bigger picture is that mechanically recycled polypropylene takes a small fraction of the energy required to produce virgin polypropylene from fossil feedstock. Every tonne of our recycled pellet that goes into a manufacturer's product is a tonne of virgin plastic production avoided, along with the oil extraction, cracking and polymerisation that would otherwise sit behind it. The recycling route Waterhaul exists to scale is the lower-energy, lower-emissions option. It is the alternative to it that is genuinely energy intensive.
The waterless process we've developed also removes the energy-intensive wash and dry stages that conventional mechanical recycling relies on, which brings the energy demand of our route lower still.