Closing the materials loop
Published on October 6th, 2024
The phrase “we can’t recycle our way out of” refers to single-use plastics, and the idea that recycling alone is not enough to solve it. However, the world is producing disposable plastics faster than it can collect and recycle them. Can the same be said about sails?
Sails are typically repurposed as tote bags and accessories, but when everyone has enough bags, then what? Perhaps a solution is “in the wind” as technologies to separate the fossil oil based composite material after use and prepare it for re-use are emerging. Report by METSTRADE:
The brothers Joe Penhaul-Smith and Sam Penhaul create new sails and textiles from old yacht sail cloth. Joe is a scientist specializing in biotechnology and green chemistry, while Sam is a professional sailor and boat builder.
The brothers have seen the amount of sail cloth being dumped as landfill, causing environmental pollution. They calculated that for sailing, including leisure sailing, sail racing and the emerging sector of sail propulsion for transport, 13 million square meters of sail cloth is produced every year. That is 2000 tons of material. Only 0.1 percent of sail cloth is re-used as bags or jackets.
The Penhaul brothers have developed a clean method to treat end-of-life sails and retrieve the components they were made of: mostly fibers and resins. These materials, they use to create new cloth: textiles for clothing and for new sails. The method for recycling as well as the products made through this method, is named Extricko.
Joe describes the upcycling method as a “breakthrough in green chemistry that recycles every sail component with zero waste. We’ve proven it works and believe it should be the new industry standard. Our goal is to expand this technology across the outdoor world.”
The method they developed uses pressolysis as a leading principle, applying superheated steam. The Extricko method can be used to recycle 99.9 percent of yacht and ship sails: dacron, mylar, carbon, and other sails alike. The brothers founded their company Sustainable Sailing three years ago and are now scaling up. In their first year, Sustainable Sailing collected and upcycled about 100 kg. of sails, the second year it was 800 kg., this year they hope to exceed 2000 kgs.
Getting a constant supply of end-of-life sails is the next challenge in the upscaling of Sustainable Sailing. The company from Melbourne in the English Midlands has a sails recycling service, offering collection bins or containers to yacht clubs to dispose their old sails and collecting services for professional sail racing teams.
Large scale collecting could make the process of sail recycling much more efficient. In partnership with the RYA Green Blue and World Sailing Trust, Sustainable Sailing is currently researching the feedstock of recyclable materials.
Source: metstrade.com