145 COMMENTARY Circularity in motion To create sustainable ship interiors, designers must go beyond recycled products and materials and instead embrace circularity, recoverability and lifecycle management CRISTINA STEFANI Cristina Stefani is marketing strategist for circularity projects at Italian fibre manufacturing firm Aquafil The maritime sector is facing monumental environmental challenges, including tightening regulatory pressures and evolving passenger expectations surrounding sustainability. As such, cruise lines, shipbuilders and interior design decision-makers must play their part to make improvements within a much larger ecosystem. They should stop viewing sustainability as an optional environmental cost or problem to solve and start treating it as asset management. Thankfully, this shift is happening, albeit slowly. Many designers are no longer solely focused on aesthetic appeal and technical performance metrics; today, a product’s environmental impact is just as critical. This is why all design decision-makers working on newbuild ships or refits must choose sustainable materials much earlier in the design process and not just as an afterthought. However, they must go further still. Rather than simply choosing recycled materials, decision-makers should ask themselves if an interior asset can be easily disassembled and recycled at the end of its lifecycle. Aquafil offers genuine circularity via our Born Regenerated to be Regenerable (R2R) initiative – created in partnership with Italian carpet manufacturer Radici Marine. This carpet recovery and recycling system creates a true closed loop along the chain and is the only way for the industry to stop managing the waste it creates in ship refit projects and start managing continuous resources. There is increasing demand for robust, verifiable data to support environmental claims. Lifecycle Assessments, product certifications and transparent circularity strategies are becoming essential elements in the specification process. By choosing materials designed for circularity, such as the International Maritime Organization-certified Bloom Back carpet made with ECONYL regenerated nylon 6, decision-makers are actively reshaping ship interiors, proving that luxury, durability and absolute environmental responsibility can seamlessly coexist. A challenge as vast as the one facing the maritime sector cannot be solved by one partnership alone, which is why we are actively deepening our strategic partnership with Radici Marine and collaborating with other carpet manufacturers. Aquafil might not be the silver bullet for decreasing maritime pollution, but we are a reliable partner for responsible circular design. Ships in the AIDA Cruises and Costa Cruises fleets feature Bloom Back carpet created by Aquafil and Radici Marine
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