When she wrote that “each living thing is bound to its world by many threads,” Rachel Carson was describing the Atlantic seaboard, but it’s true for coastlines worldwide. It’s true for any community where living things rely upon one another in a weave of support and coexistence.

At BIONIC, we think a lot about weaving. Our business is about weaving a cohesive whole out of many small but crucial pieces. Just as a shoreline has a vital role for each organism to play in a functioning ecosystem, we know that we have to pay great attention to the strength of each component piece in order for the tapestries we weave to emerge greater than the sum of their parts.

This is true of our products—we physically weave high-performance textiles from reclaimed marine and coastal plastic—but it’s also deeply embedded in how we run the rest of our business. We like to think we’re strengthening the fiber of local communities, spinning them together into threads along the world’s coastlines, interlaced into something bigger, something with the potential for real change.

Without the individual threads of our communities and our work on the ground, there is no BIONIC. It’s our deep engagement with people that makes our model possible. Our unique collection system, built of local teams, trucks, recycling stations, and coastal clean-ups, sets us apart in manufacturing.

On any morning in Costa Rica, one of our collection trucks will bump down a dirt road into the center of Manzanillo, a quiet coastal hamlet on the Pacific Ocean. You can stand in front of the town’s small elementary school, painted in cheerful pastels and fronted by a large soccer field, and watch kids wave to our team members as they collect bottles and empty the recycling station. They know us, trust us to show up and do the job, and it doesn’t matter where you are; kids everywhere love a recycling truck.

Manzanillo is just one of the towns we serve on this stretch of Costa Rica’s Nicoya Peninsula. It relies on its picturesque coastline for the fishing it offers and as a draw for adventure seekers. Twenty years ago, this place was mostly dense jungle broken only by the occasional cattle ranch. Today, the local beauty and a booming tourism trade have seen a bustling community rise between the secluded beaches and breezy palm groves. A lot has changed very quickly.

One thing that didn’t keep up with the pace of development was the physical infrastructure. Suddenly, you could choose from dozens of restaurants for dinner, but the roads were still unpaved, and waste management, in particular, was sorely lacking. When we arrived, there was no recycling program and an unreliable garbage collection program, and the strain was starting to take a toll on the once-pristine environment. Uncollected trash gathered in the ditches, and plastic was washing out to sea.

Right away, we saw an opportunity. If we volunteered as the community’s recycling program, it might be a win-win. We could ensure a traceable source for our reclaimed materials, knowing that we were actively diverting plastic from the oceans while providing a sorely needed service. We took the leap. We didn’t anticipate how quickly and deeply we would become embedded. This was a whole new level of commitment for BIONIC, a marriage of public service and manufacturing. We were now in the business of strengthening an entire community, not just our products.

In the early days, when we were knee-deep in establishing the supply chain, we were pulling permits, building a facility, and securing contracts when we realized that we would be responsible for collecting everything considered recyclable. Not just plastic, which is the material that is transformed into BIONIC products, but also glass, tetrapak, and metal. We realized all at once that this was not just some convenient source of raw material or a simple way to secure a marketing edge in the competitive world of materials science but that we were assuming the mantle of community waste management and expected to provide the full service needed. If we were going to move forward, our business interests would be inextricably linked with the interests of the people we served. We were weaving ourselves into something larger.

Costa Rica was the perfect place for our pilot program. The government’s dedication to environmental protection and public health was inspiring and aligned perfectly with our values as a company. This section of Nicoya is known as one of the world’s few “Blue Zones,” a place where people live longer. The wildlife is robust, from wild iguanas and jaguarundis to sea turtles and migrating herds of crabs. It’s an ecological wonderland and a place worth protecting. But it hasn’t always been an easy road to where we are now. It’s been bumpy at least as often as smooth, but every time our team has had to overcome a challenge, that stress has pulled the threads tighter, creating a stronger weave of community.

After leaving the school in Manzanillo, the truck will stop at local businesses, restaurants, guest houses, and grocery stores. It will rumble past the beach where we recently built new lifeguard towers out of BIONIC composite lumber and swing by the local recreation center where we’ve helped upgrade the facilities. The truck will probably get stuck if the storms are bad during the rainy season. During the height of summer, half an inch of dust coats the hood. But it keeps making the rounds, and the kids keep waving. If our supply chain is a tree and its fruit is the products we make, its roots are in the communities we belong to, the local teams we build and support.

Most recycling outfits profit by selling the raw materials they collect to processors. That wouldn’t work in this part of Costa Rica because the physical environment is so challenging that operating costs are too high for a traditional model. To ensure the sustainability of the operation, we’ve had to innovate. Recyclable materials that we can’t transform ourselves, we trade for more plastic. All of it goes directly into BIONIC products, value is added through engineering and design, and our trucks can make the rounds again tomorrow. There are similar coastal communities all over the world. Communities in need of strong and committed partners to help protect their coastlines and serve their populations.

We look forward to growing.

One of the ways we like to describe our business is “Stronger Thread Greater Good.” The stronger the threads that bind us to the world – whether it’s those we weave on a loom, the ones that tie us to friends and neighbors, or those in the stories we tell – the stronger we all are. We have a vision for a more sustainable manufacturing system, call it a tapestry, that we think can cover the entire globe. But for it to work, we need to ensure the strength of each individual thread. Waste management, community building, materials science… It’s all connected.