Ship to Shore, mooring lines begin their second journey — this time to recycling and not incineration.

At the end of their service life, mooring ropes sit at a crossroads: waste or resource.

Old ropes, once destined for landfills or incinerators, are starting to tell a new story in shipping. Emerging circular-economy ventures like C-Loop are showing that even something as unglamorous as a retired mooring line can be part of the industry’s environmental reset.

Disney recently revealed it has recycled about 225,000 pounds of retired ropes from its fleet, enough to stretch more than 20 miles. Made from polypropylene plastic, the lines have been ground down and transformed into household products like flowerpots, buckets and clothes hangers. “We saw the opportunity to think creatively and collaborate with plastic recycling experts to address the industry-wide challenge of discarding and replacing mooring lines,” said Barry Compagnoni, Disney Cruise Line’s vice president of safety, sustainability and medical operations. His company has already phased out guest-facing single-use plastics, switched to aluminum water bottles, adopted reusable merchandise bags, and introduced crew uniforms made from recycled plastic, all part of a push to minimize waste at sea and ashore.

But the challenge of ropes extends far beyond one cruise operator. Mooring lines, usually replaced every seven to ten years to meet safety standards, pile up across the globe. Some estimates suggest tens of thousands of tons are discarded annually. Norwegian carrier Wallenius Wilhelmsen, working with Wilhelmsen Ships Service, is piloting a system designed to capture and recycle as much as 10,000 tons a year. Ropes collected at ports are sorted, some redirected to factories for reuse, others recycled into new products. “Safety will always be the number one priority, but we now work to establish a system where we incentivize the reuse of ropes because there is value in sending used ropes into the circular economy,” said Tore Strand of Wilhelmsen Ships Service. The idea, still in infancy, could eventually evolve into a “rope-as-a-service” model where shipowners lease ropes and recycling is guaranteed when they are retired.

That kind of circular thinking is also at the heart of C-Loop, a startup positioning itself as a global broker of maritime consumables. Its platform connects ship operators looking to retire ropes with processors and manufacturers hungry for recycled feedstock. With logistics links to more than 1,000 ports and traceability built on AI and blockchain, the company is turning rope fibers into nonwoven fabrics suitable for industries as varied as automotive interiors and construction. By skipping the conventional re-melting step and instead bonding fibers directly, C-Loop reduces contamination and produces stronger, more versatile materials.

Together these efforts point to an emerging consensus: ropes should not be treated as waste but as resources. Observers suggest that shipping lines could go further by formalizing lifecycle management programs, tracking rope performance and wear, and building recycling into procurement contracts. In such a system, operators would know precisely when to replace a line and how it would be repurposed, creating predictability for recyclers and manufacturers alike.

For now, the movement is still young, but its trajectory is clear. From cruise ships in the Caribbean to carriers in Scandinavia, and from research institutes to small startups, the maritime sector is beginning to close the loop on one of its most overlooked waste streams. The sight of a rope being hauled ashore may look the same as it always has, but its future is starting to look very different.