Focusing on the hull and deck construction only, the impact of the plug and moulds became evident very quickly. Combined they represent no less than 50% of the hull and deck assembly or 25% of the finished boat ready to sail (bottom)
Left: Brutal truth. Look at just the primary structure of an Imoca, and the staggering share – one half – of the total greenhouse gas impact that is attributable solely to creating the tooling is made even worse by the fact that inevitably all of the plugs and moulds will later be discarded as waste; typically shortly after completion. Centre: a more detailed breakdown that looks at the finished Imoca ready to race. Again the biggest single quotient remains the tooling, which seen as a clockface runs roughly from midnight to 4 o’clock. Important to note here too that the carbon foils are alone responsible for 50% more impact than the hull and deck combined. Bottom: SailGP takes it on the chin when it comes to highlighting the extraordinary environmental cost of transport and in particular of air travel. These numbers can fairly be described as horrendous and so all credit to Coutts & Co for putting their warts and all study into the public domain
build of their new boat. Their annual reports show nicely how the results can be used to make decisions and drive change. A first important outcome from this is that the impact from the annual operations
(495 tonnes of CO2 equivalent) of the team is almost as big as the impact from designing and building the boat (553
tCO2e) itself. While these numbers are for one specific Imoca there is no reason why they should be fundamentally different for other teams. Moreover, it seems that even for Figaro teams the ratio is quite similar: on a very different scale, but here as well the operations of the team have about the same impact as the production of the boat. The second noteworthy point from the
LCA results of 11th Hour Racing is that within their operations travel, transport and fuels (‘well to tank’, WTT – the contri- bution of fuels before they reach the vehicle) make up a huge part of the impact. Extrapolate to a four-year Vendée Globe cycle (four years of operations, one boat built) and the point becomes even more striking: the impact of moving people and goods for the operations is almost twice as bad as the impact from building the boat! This illustrates the concept of low-
hanging fruits: of course it is important to reduce the impact of the materials and processes we use to build a boat. As we can see from the chart (left) particularly the plugs and moulds hold lots of poten- tial. This quickly becomes difficult, but there is plenty more low-hanging fruit in travel and transport; particularly air travel. When trying to reduce the impact of the
been standardised such that a basic LCA can be generated very quickly without expert knowledge required. Thus today MarineShift360 has become the de facto standard for the sailing industry. This, in
48 SEAHORSE
turn, makes comparison and exchange of data easier. 11th Hour Racing have been using LCA extensively on their Imoca campaigns and conducted an in-depth impact analysis during the design and
structure and the appendages, for example, trade-offs between maximum performance on the race course and minimal environ- mental impact often make decisions diffi- cult or expensive. On the other hand, how much moving of people and goods is necessary for the programme? How much air travel and freight do we need to win a race? Can we source materials more locally? Transport by ship? With good advance planning and then
delivery, to a large extent none of these should have much impact on the boat’s
SAILGP
11TH HOUR RACING
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