A sailor in a boat with a lot of sail showing . . . the type which Sustainable Sailing says it has found a way to recycle.

Sustainable Sailing, a specialist in sail recycling, is launching the UK’s first nationwide cross-water sports survey to understand the equipment and clothing used in water sports in the UK and help it develop the most useful technologies.

Sustainable Sailing, named Startup of the Year in 2023 by the Institute of Engineering and Technology (IET), aims to explore UK consumers’ current trends, preferences, and attitudes towards their watersports equipment, including the amount it gets used and what happens to it at its end of life. The results will help the company meet the needs of watersports participants in the UK as it scales up its recycling systems.

“There is very little point in developing the world’s greatest surfboard recycling system if the bigger issue that water sports participants face is a shed full of broken paddles they cannot responsibly dispose of,” the firm says. “Similarly, there are very few recycling systems which can manage neoprene, but because it is very hard-wearing compared to some other fabrics, this may be less of an issue than expected if neoprene clothing is kept in use for over ten years.”

Sailboats on the water

In the UK, one million tonnes of used textiles are generated annually. While some of these textiles can be resold, repurposed or recycled, this is often not possible for sportswear, meaning these textiles end their lives in landfill. Once in landfill, textiles lose microplastics which have since been detected across the globe, including in Antarctica .

The situation is even worse for composite materials, such as glass fibre, used to build water sports equipment. There are over 1.5 million composite yachts and 1 million composite dinghies globally, with about 1-2 per cent reaching end-of-life (EoL) annually. Recently, the fibres and resins that fragment from these EoL boats have been shown to be eaten by shellfish and cause ecosystem damage.

Sustainable Sailing has been developing recycling solutions specifically targeted at the water sports world, to prevent these textiles and composites reaching landfill. The firm says its solution can even recover these textiles’ chemical building blocks. This means these building blocks can be reassembled afterwards to make new garments.

“Our clothing and equipment is designed to be hard-wearing and resistant to all the abuse of high-performance sports, but this has come at the cost of being difficult to manage at the end of use,” says Dr Joe Penhaul-Smith, founding director of Sustainable Sailing. “This survey will allow us to understand the needs of our consumers, allowing us to innovate and offer environmentally responsible products and services. We encourage all UK residents who participate in adventure sports to take part in our survey and share their valuable insight.”

Other key areas of focus in the survey include understanding the types of adventure sports people in the UK favour and the textiles and equipment used, gathering information about the quantity of sports-related textiles and equipment that consumers own, assessing current processes for end-of-life textiles and how these could be improved, and exploring consumer attitudes towards recycling old or worn-out sports clothing and their willingness to adopt recycled products.

Sustainable Sailing’s marine sport textile recycling survey is available online.

The post Sustainable Sailing launches UK-wide survey for watersports enthusiasts appeared first on Marine Industry News.