Many GRP boats are
broken up for landfi ll
once stripped of partsby dismantling 20 boats in its first two
years, but has scaled up dramatically in
recent years.
After securing more than €100,
of government funding, the firm has
teamed up with Stena Recycling, one of
the biggest players in Sweden, to create
a nationwide network for disposing of
old boats. It is now in talks with national
boating association SweBoat to get the
industry on board as well. To date it has
recycled 320 boats in seven years.
Maria told MBY: “SweBoat wants to
solve the problem before the government
starts imposing regulations. We have
started to have a dialogue with the
manufacturers and our goal is to get as
many boats in as possible. We need to
do campaigns in different communities
to send out the message.”What about the UK?
At the moment, there is no British
equivalent to APER or Båtskroten.Southampton-based Boat Breakers is
the UK’s only marine scrap yard, and
although it can salvage many spare
parts, anything that’s leftover has to be
sent to landfill. Steve Frankland,
managing director at Boat Breakers,
told MBY: “We’re very heavily regulated
in this country by the Environment
Agency. The minute a boat sinks it
becomes very expensive to bring it up
to standard.”
Steve has to pay £135 for everyRecycling old boats
The truth about
How can we dispose of the growing heap of derelict GRP boats?
Why is it in the news?
This year’s Metstrade marine
equipment show (METS) dedicated a
whole day to a conference on the future
of yacht recycling. The issue has been
attracting attention for some time, and
in the past few years projects in France
and Sweden have started to gather
serious momentum.What’s the issue?
The latest British Marine figures
estimate that there are currently
600,000 boats over 2.5m long in
the UK but with a finite number of
willing buyers and almost 3,000 new
boats sold each year, the old ones
have to go somewhere.Why not scuttle them?
GRP, like many man-made fibres, can
be harmful to the environment,
especially when broken up into small
enough pieces to enter the food
chain. A Swedish study recently found
that GRP will take around 25,
years to biodegrade.Why are yachts so
hard to recycle?
Wood and metal are relatively
straightforward to reuse and recycle,
but the real challenge comes with GRP,
which is very difficult to reuse.
Efforts to turn old GRP into building
materials have proved uneconomical. It
can be used as fuel for power stations,
but to avoid releasing noxious gasses it
has to be burned at 12,000ºC – most
industrial furnaces can only get as hot
as 1,300ºC, and so the only power station
in Europe that is set up to take GRP is in
Germany. The shipping costs alone
make this a prohibitively expensive
option for UK-based scrap companies.Who is leading the way?
French association APER has been
recycling boats since 2009, but
Swedish start-up Båtskroten has been
going even longer. Founded in 2007 by
Maria Rindstam and Josefin
Arrhénborg, Båtskroten started smalltonne of scrap material he sends to
landfill. As a result, he charges roughly
£350 per tonne to process an old boat.
Meanwhile, British Marine says that it
is constantly discussing this developing
issue. A spokesperson told MBY: “As the
capabilities of yacht recycling vary from
country to country it’s a situation we
are consistently tracking and reviewing
with our partners.”What can be done?
The main problem is making recycling
a more economical option than
scrappage. Maria charges roughly £
per tonne, but this doesn’t include
transportation costs and she admits
that many of her customers have
chosen recycling out of a sense of
environmental responsibility. She
estimates that Båtskroten will need to
recycle more than 300 boats per year
to cover its costs, although to start
eating into Sweden’s backlog of old
GRP boats, it will need to be more like
2,000 per annum.
Meanwhile, Steve argues that those
at the other end of the supply chain
should be taking more responsibility:
“Insurance companies should charge
an end of life tax, like they do in the USA- this could be as little as £30 per year.”
However, Simon Bowen, managing
director of Pantaenius, told MBY: “An
end of life premium isn’t something
we’d look at purely from an insurance
point of view, but there’s a wider
industry question about how this
material is disposed of and whether it
can be recycled back into the
construction process.”
Wood and metal are relatively straightforward to
recycle but the real challenge comes with GRPFOR AGAINST
●Leaving your boat to biodegrade
could take thousands of years
●Once processed and cleaned up,
GRP can be used as fuel
in industrial power stations
●Recycling is the environmentally
responsible thing to do●Europe’s only GRP-friendly power
station is in Germany
●Transportation costs can
make scrappage the more
economical option
●Recycling schemes have very
small margins and need a lot of
industry supportMBYINVESTIGATES
NEWS14 JANUARY 2016