A traditional yard with a very modern approach. The first Spirit 30 from Spirit Yachts in the UK was built using Sipo mahogany ring frames and Douglas fir planking – all sustainably sourced. Then, in place of the traditional fibreglass external skin, the yard used a flax material which was also bonded to the hull using the latest bio-based epoxy from Pro-Set. Auxiliary power is electric… of course
environmental impact on a global scale) is too big to grasp intuitively.
The key to making an impact Luckily once one starts measuring, and often surprisingly quickly, we usually find actions that are fairly easy to take and at the same time have a significant impact. These are the low-hanging fruits: actions you can take today with limited effort that will have big results. Today the key to sustainable sailing is
to find these low-hanging fruits, advance where easy gains can be made quickly, reduce the impact right now, and in the meantime work on tackling the more chal- lenging questions for tomorrow. Even if the low-hanging fruits are not the shiniest ones for the marketing catalogue, these are the ones that can make a real difference today. The tool we use to measure the impact
and hence find our low-hanging fruits of sustainability is called Life Cycle Analysis (LCA). Using LCA is already common practice in other industries. Notably the automotive industry has built up sizeable LCA departments over the past few years, and LCA is becoming increasingly common in the sailing industry too. The idea behind LCA is, as its name
indicates, to measure the impact of a product over its entire life cycle… the big picture. Normally, although there can be exceptions, an LCA extends from ‘cradle to grave’, that is starting with the produc- tion of the raw materials (cradle), through the manufacturing of the product itself, to its distribution and use, and extending to the product’s recycling or disposal (grave). An alternative, though incomplete and
hence susceptive to wrong conclusions, would be a cradle to gate analysis. Here one considers the upstream impacts, but
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neglects everything that happens after the final product leaves the producer’s ship- ping dock (gate) for its end user. For a sail, for example, cradle to grave
would cover (1) the impact of the produc- tion of the fibres and then yarns used in the sail cloth, (2) the production of that cloth and (3) the manufacturing of the sail itself from the cloth, including the energy and auxiliary materials consumed as well as all transport in between the production stages. It would then also cover (4) the impact during the use of the sail (for example, products used for maintenance, repair and cleaning) and finally (5) the impact of its disposal, for example when recycling the sail into bags, burning it in an incinerator or dumping it into a landfill. A cradle to gate analysis would, how-
ever, neglect phases (4) and (5) and hence would be indifferent to how the sail is used, how much maintenance it requires and/or how it is being disposed of – recy- cling, incinerating or even composting, it makes no difference. Obviously this does not cover the full picture.
The metric – carbon footprint The impact is measured on several metrics (contribution to global warming, mineral resource depletion, marine eutrophication, water consumption…) and per kilogram of the product under consideration. For this text to not get out of hand we will focus on the global warming impact, also referred to as the carbon footprint. The others are, of course, important too. And while our choices of what is ‘greener’ will rank differently on each metric, the impor- tant logic remains the same: easy answers are not automatically the best; we should instead look at the big picture and start with those low-hanging fruits.
For our flax sail we could thus deter-
mine the impact of substituting 2kg of the original fibres by 10kg of flax on all these metrics. We might need more of the flax fibres
(10kg instead of 2kg in this example) to make up for inferior mechanical properties. But how does that change the impact of the new sail on a big picture scale? With LCA we will see how increased land use, differ- ent fertilisers, energy use and shifted trans- portation routes weigh against (possibly?) reduced use of mineral resources and improved end-of-life performance. As you can imagine an LCA can quickly
become a very complex undertaking. Moreover, for a truly complete picture it will involve not only in-house data from the producer of the consumer product, but extended up and down the supply chain. This is why the automotive industry, which is more and more required by law to provide comprehensive LCA data, is setting up big LCA offices. The experts working there enable the transfer of LCA data between OEM and suppliers as an integral part of their design data – just like weight or cost for any supplied piece. In the sail- ing industry we are not quite there yet and often it is difficult to get the necessary input from the supply chain.
Reducing complexity To tackle this issue of non-transparent supply chains and the daunting amounts of data needed to start a meaningful LCA, several projects have set out to make the process easier. MarineShift360, developed by 11th Hour Racing and now operated by Anthesis Group, is one of these. It is designed for the marine industry, with ease of use at its core. With many simplifications, inputs have
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