Matthew Sheahan

IF WE CAN’T EVEN LET GO OF OUR OLD CREW T-SHIRTS, IS THERE REALLY A FUTURE FOR RECYCLABLE BOATS?

Iwish my wife had been listening to a recent radio feature which discussed the growth in popularity of buying second-hand clothes. Had she heard it I’d like to think the sustained pressure to clear out my sailing wardrobe would have eased. Ignoring the fact that the interviewee deliberately avoided saying ‘second-hand’ and replaced this otherwise accurate expression with ‘pre-loved’, I was nonetheless interested in the argument that clothes should be like art, where good examples are treasured for what they mean to us. We should also be conscious and enjoy what wearing them must have meant to the person that gave them away, a gesture that was made presumably in the hope that someone else could love them as much as they had.

This strategy could surely form a case for hanging on to the many branded T-shirts, shorts, jackets and foul weather gear that clutter our house. I’ve long maintained that they have sentimental value. Indeed, I’ve still not fully got over having to relinquish an OK70 T-shirt from the national championships of the same year that my father handed down to me.

Admittedly, I don’t hold out much hope on this argument for maintaining my archive of sailing clothing, but it did get me thinking about recycling our boats, how emotionally attached we get to them and whether there really is a need to create a recycling policy for them. After all, how often do you hear of boats being scrapped?

We’re pretty good at recycling our boats – or selling them, as it’s better known.

However, earlier this year a press release caught my eye that talked about a design for the 2024 Olympics to be built from a new sustainable material. A material that would avoid the need to scrap boats. Instead, the boat could be recycled to produce another.

Aimed primarily at the mixed doublehanded offshore class proposed for the Paris Games, this Finot Conq offshore scow was to be produced by the Ultimate Boat Company (UBC) and called the Olympic 32 (good luck with the name!).

The construction material was a major part of the pitch. The International

Olympic Committee wants sustainability to be a critical aspect of the 2024 Olympics that aims to be the first ever carbon-neutral Games. World Sailing has its own sustainability agenda which requires 90% of the weight of an Olympic boat to be recyclable by 2028. The Olympic 32 aimed to be the first composite racing yacht to achieve this.

As we now know, double-handed offshore sailing has been shelved for 2024, but the construction material is perhaps an even bigger story. Instead of using conventional glassfibre composite construction, the plans were to build the boat from DANU, a patented recyclable bio-composite material. The UBC has a licence to use it and was planning to do so with the Olympic 32.

Details about its specific make up are not publicly available, but broadly speaking the bio composite is understood to consist of a natural fibre within a styrene-free resin that can be efficiently reconstituted to provide the raw material for another build once the first one has come to the end of its life. While its structural properties don’t quite match that of carbon, DANU is said to be stiffer and lighter than conventional glassfibre. A further advantage is that it uses the same infusion and vacuum process to create the laminate, making it no more difficult to handle during construction.

When it comes to reusing DANU the manufacturers claim there are no structural losses in the raw materials once they have been reconstituted. Furthermore, the energy required to reconstitute the material is low when compared to that required for other composite materials. On the face of it DANU certainly sounds like it could be an important building block as we move towards a more sustainable future. Yet there are still a number of questions I’d have, starting with: how many glassfibre boats actually do get discarded, crushed or buried in landfill sites? How would we incentivise owners to hand over their boats to be melted down?

I’m all for new materials and techniques that are greener and better for the environment and DANU looks like it could be a great example. But if hanging onto old clothes with no commercial value is an issue, I wonder how

we’ll get on with old boats?

‘How many glassfibre boats do get discarded?’