From video journalist to restaurateur, Emily Packer (a self-described “entrepreneur at heart”) has worn a lot of hats throughout her career, but her most recent venture, Coldharbour Tiles, is particularly special. The Berlin-based start-up takes discarded plastic fishing nets and uses them in the manufacture of high-performance, visually striking wall tiles for interior commercial applications. After meeting Packer briefly at this year’s Clerkenwell Design Week, TSJ had to get in touch to discover the full story behind the innovative, eco-friendly business.
“It all goes back to when I was living in Rwanda as a video journalist,” Packer explains. Throughout the course of her travels across the continent, she was regularly and directly confronted with the realities of plastic pollution. Unlike in Europe or the US, where sophisticated waste infrastructure allows us to avoid thinking about what happens to our rubbish after throwing it away, “there it was really just in your face and it was everywhere”.
On researching the issue, Packer quickly learned that the biggest contributor to plastic pollution was packaging. “So at the time I was working as a video journalist, but I had also just opened a restaurant in Kigali called KOKO Club, and we tried to be as plastic-free as possible. We were making our own food packaging from recycled paper and beeswax and banana leaves, making our own soap and ketchup and everything.” Unfortunately, even with this rather extreme degree of self-sufficiency and effort, it was still difficult to avoid plastics, and given the lack of recycling infrastructure available, the waste began piling up.
The rough concept
Around 2019, Packer began to think about the problem on a larger scale: “How could we really lock away a lot of plastic for a long time?” And it was this question that eventually led her to Coldharbour Tiles.
Starting off as little more than a DIY project to reuse household objects, Packer cut up her old shampoo bottles and bottle caps and melted them in her own kitchen to create the first tiles. “I saw a lot of possibility there,” she explains, “especially with the aesthetics, where you could create interesting effects and colours. And we had a really good reaction from the very beginning.”
Of course, the process of turning that concept into a business – even a small one – is full of unexpected challenges. “I thought it would be up-and-running within a year, but the more questions you ask, the more complicated it becomes!” Packer credits her American upbringing for the “nothing-can-stop-me” attitude that helped her pursue the project through inexperience and an abundance of obstacles. “It doesn’t always pan out,” she says, “but I have this belief that if you’re curious, that will take you far.”
In Packer’s case this curiosity was fueled even further by her feelings of urgency around the plastic crisis. “The more I learned about how plastic is affecting not only the environment but also our health; how much the average person consumes unknowingly in salt, in yeast, in the air – I became really scared by the scale of the problem. So, despite all of the pitfalls, this business became easier than the others, because there’s a really strong ‘Why’ there. This is worth fighting for because the more tiles we can make, the more plastic we can recycle, and that’s really the goal at the end of the day.”
Refining the approach
While the initial idea of Coldharbour was a sound way of locking away waste plastic, Packer was also keen to ensure the tiles were a functional and effective material that met modern building standards. “I really wanted to make sure that if I was making a tile, it could be used in both residential and commercial spaces safely. And this started the journey of: How do we make it fire resistant? How can we meet the industry’s safety and performance standards without using toxic additives?”
In 2024, the company’s recently launched net positive tile collection boasts a Class A fire safety rating, very high UV protection, scratch resistance, as well as minimal VOC emissions and – naturally – a high degree of recycled content. The range is supplied in six ocean-inspired colours in 4x4cm mosaics, although Packer emphasises that the company also offers the option to work with clients on custom shapes.
At this stage, Coldharbour recommends the use of its tiles only for interior wall applications, however with additional testing Packer hopes the product will be suitable for flooring applications and even outdoor use.
The right help
One of the biggest issues Packer faced in creating Coldharbour Tiles was the prevailing attitude from the plastic industry. “A lot of people thought this wasn’t possible,” she explains, “but not being from the plastics industry, I got to ask a lot of very naive questions with a beginner’s mindset, and eventually met partners willing to give it a try.”
Finding helpful collaborators seems to have been a key element in realising Packer’s concept at a commercial level. At its core, Coldharbour Tiles is a four-person team, working from a rented space in a car part manufacturing facility. However, the plastic it uses comes from a company in Denmark. “They collect plastic fishing nets from around the Baltic Sea region, they wash them and then pelletise them. We take the material from there and add it to our formulation,” Packer explains. Shockingly, despite the amount of plastic used globally every day, it was difficult for the company to find a partner who could supply non-virgin plastic. “So it was reassuring to have a strong starting point.”
Beyond the supply of raw materials, Coldharbour also works with contract manufacturing partners on the production side, as well as independent artists on the creative end. One of these artist-led collections, “One Fish, Two Fish,” by London-based illustrator Monika Forsberg, even won a German Design Award for Best Eco Design.
Scaling up
Like many products designed with a sustainable ethos, Coldharbour’s tiles are sold at a relatively high price point currently. “We’re currently selling the tiles for €375 per sqm, but I think in the future if we’re able to operate at larger volumes we would be able to get that price down,” Packer says. That’s why the company is currently focused primarily on large scale commercial projects, as well as any interior design or architect firms that are pursuing certifications such as LEED, under which Coldharbour Tiles offer four credits (two from the recycled plastic content and two from their non-toxic formulation). “These are all things that help the tiles offer more benefits than just their aesthetics.”
Ultimately, Packer hopes to increase production, not just to improve the efficiency and cost of the tiles, but because “the more tiles we make, the more plastic we can recycle”. Indeed, she explains that fishing nets are “only the start” for the company. “I hope we can create collections from only bottle caps or only children’s toys, for example.”
One part of this scaling up process will involve bringing all production in-house to improve the transparency of Coldharbour’s processes. The double-edged sword of our modern, sophisticated waste infrastructure, Packer points out, is that there is a lot of mistrust around recycling. “In the future we plan to have our own washing and compounding and shredding machines in-house, so we can have full visibility over where it’s coming from and all the steps until it becomes a tile.”
Perhaps most exciting of all, Coldharbour has already had developers from across the world approach it to enquire after its processes. “Especially in developing countries, we’ve had people ask: ‘How can I create tiles from the waste in my country?’ So I hope we can shrink down the production process in the future and be able to create micro-factories all over the world – that’s kind of the dream scenario.”
While that dream may seem far off today, the idea of creating tiles from discarded fishing nets would have seemed implausible just a few years ago. By now, Coldharbour Tiles has earned the benefit of the doubt.
www.coldharbourtiles.com