Environment
The simple moves that soon add up
You’d expect the environmentally-driven 11th Hour Racing Team to push harder than most when it came to building their latest Imoca 60. They did not disappoint...
There’s a quick, cost-neutral and almost effortless way to massively reduce the environmental impact of building a high-performance sailing yacht. For an Imoca 60 you can cut the total carbon footprint by almost a third, simply by ensuring that the boatyard and key suppliers are on a 100 per cent renewable electricity tariff. It’s usually easy to switch energy suppliers and renewable energy is becoming very competitive in price, so it can be a triple bottom line win – for the client, for the builder and for the environment. That’s one of the key findings from 11th Hour Racing Team’s project to design and build a new Imoca within the current class rules, without compromising on performance. They’ve set an important benchmark, explored alternative materials and compared the impact of build methods. They’ve calculated the total footprint of a grand prix raceboat build and its entire supply chain with greater accuracy than has ever been done before. And now they’ve published their findings in a Design & Build
Above: with their new Imoca 60, Malama, 11th Hour Racing Team has set an important benchmark for the carbon footprint and environmental impact of new raceboat builds. Their Design & Build report offers a template and guide for other teams, builders and suppliers who hopefully will soon be
following in their wake
Report that’s freely available online. With life cycle assessment soon to be mandatory for new Imocas and environmental initiatives afoot in other grand prix classes, it’s time for sailing teams and their suppliers to get serious about sustainability. 11th Hour Racing Team’s Design & Build Report provides a roadmap, a template and a significant shortcut for other racing teams, boatbuilders, boat owners and marine industry suppliers. ‘Pooling our knowledge is a huge part of this and we need to get together rather than running down the road in parallel,’ says Wade Morgan, the America’s Cup and Ocean Race sailor who now works as 11th Hour Racing Team’s build manager. ‘We’ve got to talk to each other, bring it into the circle, share our mistakes as much as our successes.’ To mark the release of the Design & Build Report, Seahorse has compiled some insights and advice from the key people who researched and produced it, along with some useful lessons learned from their own recent raceboat build at CDK Technologies in Brittany.
You need to start earlier than you think
The four-year cycle of a typical ocean racing campaign just isn’t long enough to achieve major gains in sustainability or reductions in footprint within the status quo of build timelines and the focus on performance. ‘To implement a new build process would require at least an additional 18 months of trialling new materials, testing them for reliability in the boatyard and out on the water, and working in the engineering space before you have a product in which you can have confidence,’ says 11th Hour Racing Team’s sustainability manager Damian Foxall.
‘Even though we began a long time ahead of The Ocean Race start, it was already too late to do something radically different in terms of materials or process that wasn’t incentivised by the rules,’ Foxall says. ‘What we did have was an opportunity to explore many aspects of sustainability while going through business as usual like any other team. Unlike other teams, we have
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THIERRY MARTINEX/11TH HOUR RACING
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