Palm equipment: Seawastex®
2026 Product of the Year (Sustainability Award)
Among the highlights of last year’s Paddle Sports Show was the 2026 Product of the Year Awards, organized in partnership with KS Publishing and the Paddler’s Guide. Each year, the contest spotlights the best new paddlesports gear for the upcoming season. The 2026 Sustainability Award was presented to Palm Equipment for their new Seawastex® gear line. To understand more about this new material made from recycled fishing nets, we asked the team a few questions about how it works and how it came to life.
Congratulations on winning the 2026 Sustainability Award at the Paddle Sports Show for Seawastex®. Can you introduce the technology in a couple of sentences?
Winning the Sustainability Award was a real milestone because Seawastex® is the first post-consumer recycled fabric we’ve trusted enough for our premium outerwear. Made from discarded fishing nets, it delivers the strength, durability and feel we’d expect from any premium technical fabric, without compromise.
How much time and effort went into bringing this to life?
You could say it’s taken thirty years. Our founder, Andy Knight, has been developing paddlesports clothing since making some of the first kayaking drysuits in the early 1990s. In that time he’s seen countless new fabrics and waterproof technologies arrive, each promising to be the next big breakthrough. Some genuinely were. Plenty weren’t.
« Seawastex® is the first post-consumer recycled fabric we’ve trusted enough to build our premium outerwear from. Recycled, but never second best. »
Over the years we’ve worked with mills, membrane manufacturers and textile specialists across South East Asia, seeing how these materials are developed and understanding what they can, and can’t, deliver. Some looked great on the cutting table or in the sample room. Others made it into prototype garments. But cold water, repeated immersion, UV and years of hard use soon expose any weaknesses.
That’s why we’ve never adopted a material simply because it’s new, or because it’s recycled. It has to perform first. Seawastex® is the first post-consumer recycled material where we haven’t felt we were making a compromise. We’d happily build our best drysuits from it.
Does it build on ideas or developments Palm has worked on previously?
We’ve never viewed sustainability as a separate project. It’s always been about finding practical ways to reduce the environmental impact of our products without compromising the performance paddlers rely on. Over the years that’s meant introducing post-production recycled materials where they make sense, finding uses for production offcuts and exploring bio-based alternatives.
We’ve taken the same approach with PFAS, steadily reducing their use for more than a decade. Palm moved away from long-chain C8 fluorocarbons in 2015, transitioned through C6 technologies, and today the vast majority of our technical products are made without intentionally added PFAS. Seawastex® builds on that work. It’s another step forward rather than a change of direction.
« Independent testing shows it matches, and in some cases exceeds, virgin nylon for durability, tensile strength and abrasion resistance. »
How difficult is it to work with recycled materials in kayaking apparel?
Using post-production recycled material is one thing. Post-consumer material is much harder because the recycling process can alter the properties that made the original material desirable in the first place. We’ve seen that ourselves. Palm was the first to manufacture kayaks using marine recycled plastics, and maintaining consistent material properties between batches of recycled polyethylene was a genuine challenge. Often, additional stabilizers are needed simply to achieve acceptable performance.
Sometimes strong becomes less strong. Durable becomes less durable. For paddlesports, that’s a problem. A jacket or kayak that wears out sooner isn’t a better environmental solution. That’s what impressed us about Seawastex®. Independent testing shows it matches, and in some cases exceeds, virgin nylon for durability, tensile strength and abrasion resistance. The same regenerated nylon technology is already used in demanding applications such as high-performance bicycle tires, where consistency and durability are essential.
What were the biggest challenges in bringing it to market?
Knowing where our expertise lies. We’re not polymer scientists, and we don’t claim to invent waterproof membranes. What we do understand is what paddlers expect from their gear. So we started there. Working with our own factory, textile mills and material partners across South East Asia, we developed a fabric package engineered specifically for paddlesports. Every part of it, from the yarn through to the weave and finished fabric, was chosen to deliver the durability, waterproof performance and feel we wanted.
The challenge is that paddlesports is a relatively small market. We needed a solution that worked technically, commercially and consistently. Finding a post-consumer recycled material that ticked every box wasn’t easy and took time and refinement. Winning the Sustainability Award is fantastic recognition for everyone involved. More importantly, we’ve now got a material we’re happy to build our premium range around.
How important is Palm’s own factory to the story?
It’s a huge part of it. Choosing the right fabric is only the beginning. How it’s cut, sewn, taped and tested is just as important. Because Palm owns its own garment factory in Vietnam, we oversee every stage of production. Every drysuit is pressure tested before it leaves the factory. Seam taping machines are calibrated with support from our tape suppliers, and seam sealing takes place in climate-controlled rooms where temperature and humidity are carefully controlled. Those details matter because the best fabric in the world won’t perform if the finished garment isn’t built properly. At the end of the day, a drysuit has one job. It has to keep you dry, and it needs to keep doing that for years.
« We’ve now got a material we’re happy to build our premium range around. »
What makes Seawastex® different?
It starts with where the material comes from. The nylon is recovered from discarded fishing nets and other marine waste through collection schemes that support coastal communities by paying for nylon that might otherwise end up in landfill or the ocean. That nylon is chemically regenerated back to caprolactam, the original building block of nylon, before being turned into premium yarns.
One thing we particularly liked was the supply chain. Collection, regeneration and yarn production all happen within the same region in South East Asia, improving traceability while reducing transport compared with more fragmented supply chains. The material is certified to the Global Recycled Standard (GRS), uses around 15% less energy to produce and can reduce carbon emissions by up to 49% compared with virgin nylon.
But none of those numbers would matter if the fabric didn’t perform. What convinced us was that Seawastex® met the standards we’d expect from any premium outerwear fabric. That’s why we introduced it in the Atom, our flagship whitewater range, rather than treating it as a separate sustainability project.
How do you see this technology developing?
This is only the start. From 2026, Seawastex® features in the Atom range and across our XP 4-layer and XP 2.5-layer outerwear collections. As those products continue to evolve, we’ll introduce it more widely across the Palm range. The aim isn’t to create a specialist sustainable collection. It’s to make our core products better. As new materials become available we’ll continue assessing them in exactly the same way we always have. If they improve performance, durability and environmental impact, we’ll look at where they fit. If they don’t, we won’t use them.
What would you like to say to other brands focusing more and more on sustainability? Or to customers choosing a new paddling jacket?
Keep pushing. The outdoor industry has made huge progress over the last decade, and that’s good for everyone. The more paddlesports brands investing in better materials and manufacturing, the faster we’ll all move forward. At Palm, our focus has always been on making products that last. That’s why we’ve spent years reducing PFAS, developing Seawastex® and working with suppliers to improve the materials we use. We don’t see sustainability and performance as competing priorities. The challenge is delivering both.
For paddlers, the advice is simple. Buy the best gear you can, look after it properly and use it for years. A jacket that’s still keeping you dry after a decade on the water will almost always have a lower environmental impact than one that needs replacing every few seasons.
Sustainability often comes at a cost. How do you approach that challenge?
There’s no getting away from it. Materials like Seawastex® cost significantly more than virgin nylon. Collecting discarded fishing nets, regenerating the nylon and maintaining full traceability all add cost. That’s the reality of producing better materials. For us, though, sustainability isn’t just about what a product is made from. It’s about how well it’s made and how long it lasts. If a jacket performs for years and doesn’t need replacing, that’s a better outcome than a cheaper product with a shorter life. Durability has always been one of the biggest parts of sustainability, and that’s something we’ve believed long before the word became fashionable.
For more info on Seawastex® and Palm Equipment, visit their website.
For info on their different products, check out the Paddler Guide website and the Paddler Guide Gear Lab review videos.
