New pilot project to recycle sails for UK-based keelboat sailors

A new collaboration between R&D and consultancy firm Sustainable Sailing, Illusion keelboats and school and sail training centre Royal Hospital School, is creating a recycling scheme that will allow old sails to be spared from landfill and made new again.

Around 2,000 tonnes of sailcloth is dumped or incinerated every year in the world because of a lack of recycling options, making the sailing industry a major source of landfill material.

This new sail recycling technology relies upon recent advances in green chemistry and biotechnology to break down sails into their chemical building blocks, without problematic solvents. These building blocks can then be combined to become new sails or incorporated into other high-value products.

Dr Joe Penhaul-Smith, founding director of Sustainable Sailing says: “There has been no solution for the huge amount of sails that are landfilled every year. Plastics used to make these sails eventually break down and can escape from landfill and cause harm to the environment.

“While upcycling by cutting sails up and using them to make bags and jackets is possible, only about one per cent of all sails are currently upcycled into alternate products. Upcycling does not solve the challenge of end-of-life sail cloth; it just pushes the problem down the road for the lifetime of the garment because we cannot keep turning these items into other products more than once.

“While there are recycling technologies for some of the plastics used to build some sails, none of these operate in the marine industry, due to the blended plastic nature of the sails on the market, which can chemically “poison” a number of recycling processes.

“Our closed-loop recycling system for end-of-life sails will recover the building blocks of these plastics, in a truly sustainable solution for sails in the class.”

The pilot project is part of a longer-term plan to scale up, to become a global solution for end-of-life sails. As these systems are refined and improved, Sustainable Sailing says it will expand its recycling service to cover all dinghy, yacht, windsurfing and kitesurfing end-of-life sails in the UK and globally.

“It’s fabulous to see the work that Joe and his team have put into solving the problem caused by sails at the end of their life,” says Ed Sibson, director of sailing at Royal Hospital School, an established RYA Training Centre with a fleet of more than 60 dinghies. “Sustainability is very important to the Royal Hospital School, and this is a huge step forward in reducing the environmental impact of our sport.”

Sustainable Sailing was founded to develop solutions which can be used across all sail cloth types, including all those cloth types that have been stored in sheds for years. Over the past two years, Sustainable Sailing has been building its technologies to be usable for sails currently on the market, as well as historically popular sail types and the cloths of the future.

Last year, MIN reported that Sustainable Sailing had developed a proof-of-concept 75 per cent bio-based composite rudder blade. The newly developed alternative to fibreglass could dramatically reduce the boating industry’s carbon footprint.

The Illusion is a one-design keelboat. They are particularly popular in the Solent and the class and the class sail maker Winning Sails has been collaborating with Sustainable Sailing since Sustainable Sailing’s inception to develop scalable recycling solutions for their sails at end-of-life.

Alongside providing recycling for Royal Hospital School, any Illusion sailor who has end-of-life sails can now contact Sustainable Sailing via their sail recycling page and arrange to either drop off these sails at a collection point or have them picked up from a nominated location, with estimated costs between £15-50 depending upon the sail.