Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you can’t have failed to notice that 2015 is the year for the movement to end poverty. In September, at the UN General Assembly in New York, world leaders from 193 countries announced new GLOBAL GOALS designed to fight inequality, protect our planet, and end extreme poverty by 2030.

17 Global Goals were announced but an innovative solution caught our eye relating to Goal #14…Life Below Water – To conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development.

The Sponge Suit is an innovative, high-tech item of swimwear that could enable people to remove pollution from the oceans while they are swimming in open water. We all know Spongebob Squarepants as the resident of Bikini Bottom, but who’d have thought that he could have been the inspiration behind an innovative swimwear solution to cleaning up our waterways.

Well, it wasn’t Spongebob but Pinar Guvenc, Inanc Eray, Gonzalo Carbajo and Marco Mattia Cristofori, an inspired group of designers who came up with the Sponge Suit.

The Sponge Suit is an environmentally proactive swimsuit design, that recently won first prize at the 2015 Reshape Wearable Technology Competition. The eco apparel is made from an outer layer of 3D printed elastoplastic, that is both flexible and strong, and a hydrophobic, carbon-based filler material, which acts as a sponge. In combination, the two elements enable the suit to absorb everything except water, when submerged in the ocean. Effectively the suit enables the wearer to help clean the ocean while swimming by absorbing pollutants in their surroundings. The suit weights 54 grams and can absorb up to 25 times its own weight. After multiple uses, the swimsuit can be heated to high temperatures causing it to release the materials it has absorbed and returning the suit to a liquid form, which can then be recycled and remoulded into a new suit.

The design is only a prototype and a large suit-cleaning infrastructure would need to be created for it to be used en masse: the designers envision businesses similar to dry cleaning stores that would service the suits. The product has a host of obstacles to overcome, but it is an interesting first step towards thinking about how wearables could be used to help clean the environment.

The creators say “This design can be developed in to different outfits: bathing suits, mayokini, swimming caps. Reprogrammability, recyclability and affordability are intriguing properties of the technology, allowing room for further research and development in clean-tech wearable. The aim is for a future where everyone, with any shape and form of swimming outfit, can contribute to the cleanliness of the seas by a sports activity or simply a leisurely summer vacation.”

Maybe there are other Global Goals that can also be directly, or indirectly, addressed by the Sponge Suit too. There are 17 of them after all.