Sustainable Sailing Puts Its Sail-Recycling Process to Sweet, New Use

The UK startup is partnering with the University of Edinburgh to use waste sails in the creation of high-value chemicals used in everyday products — even, potentially, food ingredients.

Published 2 months ago | About a 4 minute read

Image: Sustainable Sailing

Sails — while manufactured using durable, synthetic textiles such as polyester, polyethylene terephthalate (PET), aramid and even carbon fiber to withstand harsh ocean environments and extreme weather conditions — still tend to need replacing every five years; professional racing teams can go through several sails per event.

Roughly 2,000 tonnes of PET sails used by the marine sector worldwide are decommissioned or damaged beyond repair every year, with the majority either remaining in storage or sent to landfill sites to decompose — which can take up to 450 years. And there are currently limited options for recycling these technical-grade materials.

Sustainable Sailing — a startup established by two brothers with backgrounds in both sailing and chemistry — is aiming to find ways to make use of this type of waste.

A research collaboration between the startup and the Sadler Lab at the University of Edinburgh recently 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 engineered biology and green chemistry 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.

Commonly used in packaging, PET maintains much of its quality and durability after recycling — so, its recycled form, rPET, is a good candidate for packaging producers looking to cut back their use of virgin plastic. But Sustainable Sailing’s process treats PET 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. The company initially focused on turning these building blocks into other types of plastic but is now looking at creating a range of more sustainable materials, using waste sails as an alternative to virgin fossil fuels in the creation of high-value chemicals used in everyday products — even, potentially, food ingredients.

Following prior University of Edinburgh research that proved the feasibility of turning single-use PET drink bottles into vanillin (vanilla flavoring) 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.

“We’re delighted to be part of this collaboration which draws upon our expertise to test the viability of using a biological system to upcycle plastic fibers from sails into high-value chemicals,” said Dr Joanna Sadler, Chancellor’s Fellow in Biotechnology and founder of the Sadler lab. “The results from our research have already had major implications for the field of plastic sustainability and demonstrates the power of engineering biology to address real-world challenges.”

As Dr Joe Penhaul Smith, founding director of Sustainable Sailing, explains: “Water sports and sailing have always been part of our family, so with my scientific background and my brother’s professional sailing experience we hope to use our skills to tackle the marine industry’s environmental footprint. 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.”

But … vanilla flavoring made from plastic? Steve Thomas, associate director of applied science and industrial biotechnology at Cambridge Consultants, told Professional Engineering that making polyester-derived chemicals food safe is “absolutely possible:” “Microplastics would not be the concern for food safety,” said Thomas, who is not involved in the Sustainable Sailing project. “The output is far more likely to contain microplastics from the polyester shirt that the person opening the bottle was wearing than the process itself.”

Sustainable Sailing is also using its process to recycle old sails into new sails. The company is part of the latest cohort of Transport Research and Innovation Grants, funded by the Department for Transport in partnership with Connected Places Catapult. This grant and development support package will be used to expand the Sustainable Sails project to cover the vast majority of sail cloths currently in use globally — processing them in a completely “closed loop,” using only water and electricity, to return the plastics and fibers back to the economy.