Project to give second life to sailing waste

Each year, around 2,000 tonnes of polyethene terephthalate (PET) sails used by the global marine sector are decommissioned or damaged beyond repair, with the majority either remaining in storage or sent to landfill.

Now, Sustainable Sailing – a start-up established by two brothers with backgrounds in sailing and chemistry – is aiming to find alternative ways to process this type of waste.  

A research collaboration between the company and the Sadler Lab at Edinburgh University has received funding through Innovate UK’s bio-based manufacturing Launchpad competition for Scotland and is also supported by the Industrial Biotechnology Innovation Centre (IBioIC).

Drawing on the expertise of the Sadler group, the team has identified an opportunity to use the waste sails as a raw material for high-value chemical compounds traditionally derived from petrochemicals.

Sails are manufactured using hard-wearing synthetic textiles to withstand harsh ocean environments and extreme weather conditions, but can need replacing every five years. Furthermore, professional racing teams go through several sails per event and there are currently limited options for recycling these technical-grade materials.

According to IBioIC, sustainable Sailing has developed a process to treat sail cloth using high-pressure steam to break the composite material down into its chemical building blocks, which can be used in existing industrial and manufacturing processes.

MORE FROM ENERGY & ENVIRONMENT

The business initially focused on turning these building blocks into other types of plastic but is now looking at the creation of more sustainable materials. The results of the project could see the waste sails being used as an alternative to fossil fuels in the creation of high-value chemicals used in everyday products.

Following prior research that proved the feasibility of turning single-use PET drink bottles into vanillin using engineered E. coli bacteria as a catalyst, the same process is being applied to assess the viability of recycling sailing waste for similar chemicals.

In a statement, Dr Joe Penhaul Smith, founding director of Sustainable Sailing, said: “Some decommissioned sails are turned into one-off clothing pieces or bags, but there’s no large-scale solution to tackle the waste material. This project aims to find a new circular recycling process where sailcloth can be broken down and repurposed into useful chemical compounds. The added benefit is that these types of compounds are traditionally manufactured from petrochemicals, so marine waste could become an alternative, more sustainable feedstock.

“The next stage of the process is to take it to a much larger scale, as well as working out the supply and demand dynamics to see whether it would be viable to have everyday chemicals manufactured in this way. There is also potential to extract different chemical building blocks for other industrial uses, and we could see additional types of technical textiles being recycled in this way in future.”