Welcome back to the Clean Sailors podcast. Let's talk about sea, marine, sailing and
keep it clean. I'm your host Holly, founder of Clean Sailors and a sailor myself with
a passion for the health of our mighty oceans. Through conversations with experts, innovators
and activists, all working towards improving the health of our seas, we're showcasing the
people and projects, changing the way things are done. We've had a couple of conversations
on the topic of end of life boats, notably with brilliant minds and teams who are working
to create fully recyclable composites from which to build new vessels going forward.
So what about those boats already in existence? What of those boats that are currently abandoned
on ashore lines globally due to no formal recycling, clear procedures, incentives or
supporting legislation when it comes to end of life? I'm really excited to be joined
by Guillaume Perben, CEO and co-founder of a Swiss based company with a global mindset
aptly named composite recycling. Guillaume, thank you so much for joining me.
Well, thank you for having me. Thank you very much, Holly.
You are very welcome. I'm very excited for this conversation because I think there's
at least four different episodes we've already done on the issue and opportunity of end of
life boats in particular. And whilst we've obviously explored manufacture and actually
building new materials which can be almost undone at the end of life, you're approaching
it, looking at materials that already exist and how we can start sort of breaking them
down and reusing them again. Is that right?
Yes, composite materials can be found in two different channels that both affect the marine
industry particularly. It's the end of life of your old boats, but it's also the production
waste from producing new boats because when you produce a boat, for example, you need
the mold for the hull, but you need to then cut the hatches, you need to cut all the different
holes for the engine, for the plumbing, and those become production scraps whereas there
are new composite materials. So disposing of those materials can be either critical
for owners of boats for the end of life or boat producers for the current operations.
So what effectively we did say 56 years ago was design these materials to be incredibly
durable, but at the time we weren't really considering the recyclability, right? So composite
recycling, your company is looking at how to shift away from the disposal landfill incineration
of basically end of life, GRP, and being able to turn it into something different. How did
you get into it? How did this company come about and what is your main goal?
Well, it came about because both my co-founder Pascal Gallo and I are sailors. We have sail
boats and they're GFRP boats and we both love the ocean. I'm sailing in the Mediterranean
and I love the sea. I love the wind. I don't love the fact that my boat is not recyclable
and that really bothers me and I have kids. They love sailing with us, but I don't like
to see those old boats, those wrecks in the harbors that are clogging the harbors. And
my co-founder is a physicist. We both know each other because our sons are best friends
and it really started at birthday party of the kids and I was telling him it really bothers
me this non-recyclability. And as a physicist, he told me there's a way to separate the
fibers from the resin. And then we work with the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne,
which is a very prominent university here. And they have a very, very talented laboratory
working on composites. It's called the Laboratory for Processing of Advanced Composites. And
the director is a very known person, the professor Michel, in the world of composite materials.
So we went to speak to her and she told me everybody knows how to do this. And I was
a bit surprised and she was like, no, in the science world, we all know how to do this.
And I went to, it was at my brother's, a naval architect, and we know a lot of people
he's from the Southampton Institute. We have a lot of friends in this industry. And at
a meeting with other naval architects, really famous ones, I told them, guys, problem fixed.
I mean, the science world knows how to do this. And they came back and said, you know,
this is the Holy Grail. I mean, nobody knows how to do this. We found such a gap between
what scientists know and what the industry considers impossible that we thought we need
to fill that gap. So without saying it is easy, the fact that it's doable was interesting.
And then we found the next hurdle, which was, yeah, sure, it's possible, but economically,
it's not viable. And then technically, it doesn't work very well, simply because the
tests that have been done were using machines that could process any type of waste. When
you make a machine that can recycle waste, you try to have as many clients as possible.
And for this, you want a machine that can do plastic tables, tires, chairs, kitchen,
a waste, whatever you want. And when you try to have a machine that is universal, you
can do everything, but you don't do anything well. So we took the approach of, I had worked
before on the tire recycling project, and the producers of the equipment were telling
me that you need to specialize in the waste. So we designed, this is what's new, we designed
an equipment that is only doing composite material. And we particularly do GFRP. So
we can't do tires, we can't do plastic tables or anything, we only do this. But by doing
this, we're not shredding, we're not moving the material, so we recover the fibers.
It's so fascinating. And I appreciate anyone listening to this won't see the face I pulled
at you when you said that the science world knows how to do this already. It was definitely
a what the kind of face, a gas mouth wide open, because you're right, this is something
that has been sort of, I wouldn't say reluctantly discussed, but I think because solutions have
been yet to found certainly scalable solutions and energy efficient solutions. And as you
mentioned, the economic viability of those solutions has yet to be proven, you're going
to tell me they already have, and that you're the solution. We'll get to that in a second.
It has just been this kind of elephant in the room, I think for so long and increasingly.
So that must have been an exceptionally exciting moment for the two of you to see that there
was this possibility and that you had this desire and the passion for making the change.
And actually, you just needed to slot the two together. Obviously, we'll discuss some
of the issues that still exists in making that process really viable. But so let's start
with the environmental perspective, right? The process of breaking down these fibers,
how energy intensive is that? Because there comes a point where you think, hey, we can
break stuff down, but it takes millions of tons of water, it takes a ton of electricity,
and the net environmental impact or energy kind of ratio is not actually palatable at
all. So how have you approached that differently? And what is the energy process required in
order to separate these materials? This is a central question. It's absolutely
central because there's no point in recycling something if you produce more waste. And that's
why, for example, we looked at something called solvulences, which is chemical recycling.
But when you do chemical recycling, you basically use a chemical bath in which you put your
composites and the separation works really well. So you really get great fibers. The
thing is, your chemical bath, and I'm putting here a very famous oil company, R&D director,
who told me at the Tech World last year, he produces soup of chemicals that nobody knows
how to deal with. So you basically move the problem from the composite to the soup. And
then what do you do with your soup? That's an issue. So we decided to go for something
that is, in our opinion, by far the best process for, particularly for glass. It also works
well with carbon, but for glass, it's amazing. So basically, we heat the composite without
oxygen. It's called thermolysis. When you do this, you prevent combustion because there's
no oxygen. The resin, the plastic part is not burning. Instead, it's vaporized. This
vapor, we condense it and that become what can be condensed, most of it becomes oil.
And what cannot be condensed remains gas, which can be used to power the machine. That's
the theory. Now, in reality, depending on the type of composite you have, you get more
or less energy from the gas you can burn. So for the beginning, we're going to start
with propane gas or electricity, right? And to give you an idea, if we use propane gas,
we basically for, let's say, one kilo of composite treated, we emit 0.6, 0.7 kilo of CO2. It's
not zero CO2. It will be, but we're reviewing at the moment solutions for capturing CO2.
They're simply not available today. So we're reviewing them. Now, again, to compare apples
and apples, when you produce one kilo of GFRP between the resin and glass, roughly, you emit
between three and five kilos of CO2. So by giving a new life to the GFRP, instead of
reproducing three to five kilos, you produce 0.6, 0.7. Now, to put things in perspective,
think about it when you want carbon on your beautiful sailboat, when you produce one kilogram
of carbon fiber, you emit between 40 and 70 kilos of CO2. So you really need to think
hard on whether you really need the carbon or not. Because, for example, a 60 foot IMOCA
boat carbon, the boat plus the mold, they've calculated they meet between five and 600
tons of CO2 for one boat. Do you really need carbon? Back to what we're doing. So today,
we do emit CO2. We do consume energy. It's very small compared to the material retreat.
And that's in the case we use propane. Our first machine is coming this summer and will
be deployed in Western France. We have a partnership with Veolia that we're about to announce.
So it's a scoop review. We're going to be on a site in Western France. Why? Because the
region around Nantes and San-Azerre, they have a lot of shipyards. They have a lot of boat
builders. They not only build yachts, they also build cruise ships in San-Azerre. And
a little bit more, the DCNS or naval group, where they build nuclear submarines, whose
interior is also made of composite material. Now, France, we're always specific because
that's how it works best. But our solution also needs to be adapting to the environment
where we are. Obviously, the idea is we need to emit as little as possible. So in France,
85% of the energy electricity is nuclear. So the machine, it's designed for this. You
can decide whether you use burners for the gas or if you replace the burners by an electric
heater. So it uses electricity. If we use 85% of nuclear electricity, then the CO2 emissions
are way lower, obviously. So it's not a debate on the type of energy. It's just practically
what you emit. So we need to be agile. We need to adapt to the local environment. Now,
if we go to Germany where the electricity is made from coal, obviously we want to burn
gas because there's less emissions. So it's all about adapting. And the first machine
we have is fitting in a 30 foot container. And the 30 foot container, because it's not
a maritime container, it's a container with a hook for the hydraulic hooks from waste
management trucks. And that means we can move it using existing equipment. So if we need
to move it, we don't need to wait for a crane. We can use any truck that they have and it
can be moved. That's really important. Today, nobody's sorting composite waste. If you go
to a shipyard, there's no incentive to sort the waste because it's an extra work that
your operators are doing. But in a shipyard, when you build a new boat or where you disassemble
an old boat, you're going to have, of course, the composite, but you're going to have the
wood from the panels from the cabins. This is not pure wood. This is a wood that has
varnish on it. This is wood that has glue on it. So you cannot recycle it. It's not
wood that you can put back to make new furniture. It's much more difficult. All of this is put
in the same bin and goes in the same landfill. So it's not sorted. The result is we don't
know how much composite there is to be treated. The European Composite Association in Brussels
has just launched a big river close to them. They've launched a big poll across all their
members in Turkey, and they found between 500,000 and 700,000 tons in 2024 of composite waste
in Europe alone will be produced 2025. It's probably going to be 800,000 tons and it's
going up and up and up. A marine of this is about 15,000 tons if I'm not mistaken. And
so at the moment, we think it's that. But because it's not sorted, if you own a shipyard
and you're building boats, until I tell you, please sort your waste, you're not going to.
But if we did this with Benetor recently and they're super happy, they're sorting their
waste now, they put it in a separate bin for composites. For us, it's great because it means,
aha, we know this. That's the reason why we have a mobile unit. We need to come to understand
where the streams of waste are, and then we can build a larger fixed capacity unit. If
the mobile unit is in the wrong location, well, it's mobile. So we can put it closer
to the waste sources. It's incredibly interesting. I'm just smiling because I've got so many
questions. It's firstly fascinating that you'll mention of sort of, I appreciate the Amok
of Boats, right? They're wonderful. We always have it. It's part of being human is, you
know, we're acquisitive, we have to innovate, we have to progress and there is invention
and ingenuity at play always. So there is actually quite a tight rope to walk between
obviously innovation and ingenuity and sort of forward thinking, particularly when it
comes to materials and obviously the environmental impact, as you mentioned. And carbon is something
that actually is only really, is a very recent, certainly more recently accessible to the
marine industry. And you'll see carbon mass even increasing in popularity, their weights,
their performance, their flexibility, et cetera. And also, as you rightly pointed out, these
high performance sailing boats, whose goal is obviously to get even more high performance,
carbon is a very palatable material to use over GRP and FRP for that kind of area of
the industry, right? Well, I thought so until I had a wonderful
lunch with skippers and the, I forgot to name the director of the class of the Ocean
50 Trimerans. Ocean 50 does not want to use carbon fiber because, and this is where she
re-blued my mind, I was so astonished. Basically, the Ocean 50 class approach and the class
40 as the same approach is to say, what matters to the public, so the people who look at the
logos of the sponsors on the boat, what matters to them is not that you cross the Atlantic
in six days, five hours, 30 seconds, what matters to them is that it's Holly who won
the race. So it doesn't matter, when you switch that paradigm, it means we don't care how
fast you go, we care your race first, because that's the point of a race as opposed to a
record. Are we doing a race or are we doing a record? And this leads to, if you're doing
a race and who a race first is what matters, then as long as everybody's using the same
material, we're fine. Which means glass fiber is perfectly fine, as long as not one boat
uses carbon fiber to give them an unfair advantage. And then you're good. And the whole thing
leads to an entire class of racing boats, all of a sudden not using carbon anymore.
And at the Jec world, this year, I was on a panel with an incredibly talented guy, Erwin
Foscher, he's the head of material innovation at Benito. He was asked a question by someone
who does race boats in Brittany. And she was very pushy. She was like, but you talk about
glass fiber, do we have a proper solution for long carbon fibers, recycled ones? And
he told her, he said, and you know, Benito, they're pretty innovative. They're doing these
boats with recycling resin from Arkema and great results. He was very direct. He said,
do you need carbon? It's a fair question.
It's an incredible question. And you've just flipped the whole paradigm entirely on its
head, which is very refreshing, but somewhat daunting, because you're absolutely right.
As long as the playing field is level, there has to be parity between all entrants, because
appreciating there's a, you know, a couple of kind of campaigns and projects that we've
been working on with a few very well known sailors around, do you need a brand new mocha
to do the race? Can you use the second hand one? And obviously the perception is very
much, well, you're not going to win the race. You're probably not going to be in the top
five against some of the newer boats, obviously, that have been created in the last two, three,
five years. But as you said, if everyone has the same tool, then it really comes down to
skill and not just the performance of the vessel that you're using to get there.
A naval architect told me a friend of mine, he told me that the Class 40 of 2024 are as
fast as the Emocha of 20 years ago. So the Class 40 is glass, the Emocha is carbon, but
he said it makes us naval architects sweat more on the design, but we find ways. And
I don't know about you. And frankly, I'm not a, I'm not a racer. I don't have the level.
I just love cruising. I remember very well the name of the people who won the last Transat
Race. I have no idea how many days or minutes it took them.
You're right. The truth is the spirit of the competition, isn't it? In that sense. But
I mean, it's fascinating because I think that the carbon point is going to be a really interesting
one to watch. It leads nicely into this obviously, friendly, important topic about regulation,
right? If carbon is responsible for that exceptional figure that you gave around the
CO2, expended for the creation of one boat, then there is only so far that individuals
can go to make the right choice over performance. And are you seeing and how much of your business
is responding quite actively to the change in legislation and regulation, particularly
in Europe? What are you finding there?
We were invited that the European Commission in Brussels in March to the end of life of
recreational boats workshop. It's a dialogue. And if you talk to the policy officer of maritime
affairs, she's incredibly sharp. She doesn't hate composites. She just responds to the
opinion at the European Parliament that we've let composites in general to lose because
incinerating them, when you burn one kilogram of plastic, you emit 2.5 kilos of CO2. Don't
burn them. But at the same time, lengthening them, well, it's a temporary solution. It
can't continue like this because then we talk about boats, but now wind turbines are arriving
and what do we do with this? So it's a question. Now, the legislators, what we hear from them
is we can't force people to do what's not possible. At the same time, we need to change
things. So we work together with the European Co-Poison Association and the European Boating
Industry as well, the EBI, very close to them as well to say, look, there are ways, there
are alternatives. And there is the brutal way that Austria has applied, which is to
say from 2022 onwards, every lengthening incineration or exporting of composites is
forbidden. It makes mountains of waste. They don't know what to do with them. They're desperate.
We don't have to go that hard. We can also just work together. And that's what we're
doing. That's what we work with them to create recycling branches of composite material.
Now, you know, Holly, we have a great solution. It works really well, but it's a technology.
It's not enough. Technology is not the silver bullet that will fix everything and let's
move on to something else. So the idea is not to ban composites because we all love boats.
And frankly, without composites, boating or yachting still would be a very rich person's
hobby and we would not have the money to do that. So because as beautiful as they are,
the wooden boats, they need a bit more attention and budget. So composites, they fuel innovation.
They fuel a lot of great things. And we need to continue using them. And we just need to
make them recyclable. There's been a very strong symptom of how much the recycling of
JFRP has been considered impossible is the development of the organic fibers, the hemp,
the linen, the flax. These are good for some applications. Some shipyards have very strong
opinions about them, not positive. But the thing is, they're a symptom that we needed
something else. So regulators look at this and they're like, okay, propose something
to us and we'll work together. And so our role is to say, there is the technology, but
it's only one piece of the puzzle. We also need waste management companies to talk to
their clients and to say, look, shipyard, look, it's important to sort the waste. There is
an incentive behind this. And if you don't do this, it will be forbidden like in Austria.
And then you have a big problem. And those waste management companies, we need to show
them it's our responsibility. And that's why we have this conversation with them, that
we can do something with the outputs of the recycling. This is our role. And to the regulators,
it's also important to show them we're not greenwashing. If you go to the legislator
and say, yeah, I can reuse the fibers. They're not great, but we're going to make just compounds
to do construction stuff. It's not recycling. It's downcycling. We prefer to say we can redo
chopstone and map. That's why we work with Chomara, with Benito, and we've done chopstone
and map with them. So we keep the value as high as possible. It means much more work.
And then you have the oil. What do you do with the oil from the resin? Well, we were
in the United States two weeks ago, you can tell them, like some people say, we're going
to make fuel. We're going to make diesel fuel. I'm sorry, but and you talk to the policy
officer in Brussels, she says, never, you can never consider that diesel is a clean recycling
product. It's not true. When you burn diesel, it's polluting. Instead, we say, let's take
an economic approach. If you take an economic approach, okay, I do diesel fuel, I sell it
one time and then I burn it. We prefer to say we do plastics. So we separate the monomers
and we work with some of the most prominent oil companies in Europe and the US now. Because
when you do plastic with the tamales oil, it's more homework. It's much more work. But
then you produce plastic, then you can recycle that plastic. You sell it a second time. And
then you can recycle it again and you sell it again. So the key is we need to have a
solution that is not greenwashing and that makes sense economically. And then it's good
for the environment. But if it does make sense economically and you need taxpayers' money
to make it work, never. So the only way to do this we found is if your process is specific
to the type of waste, and that's how you get the right parameters. It's a little bit like,
if I give you a kitchen, can you be a chef? Not necessary. It depends on what you want
to do, how much homework you do. So the equipment is one thing. But sourcing the right material,
knowing the parameters of treatment and knowing what to do with the output, then the legislator
listens to you and they start to say, okay, it makes sense.
And also approaching it, as you mentioned, with a degree of continued circularity. You're
not recycling something once. You're doing it with the aim of dividing it into components
again, which can then be reused and recycled almost ad infinitum to a degree. But I think
you mentioned something interesting around, you said a comment about hating GRP. And obviously
we've had this very similar sort of conversation the last, say, five years in particular, in
terms of a really wide scale public conversation around plastic and the sort of demonization
of plastic. And a bit like, if you gave me a kitchen, would I be a great chef? No, I
mean, the kitchen is the tool, right? Plastic is just a tool. GRP, FRP are just tools. And
actually how we utilize them, how we waste them, how we capture them, separate them,
etc. is really the key. As you mentioned, having one piece of that puzzle isn't enough.
No, it's a whole branch. And that's why we try to get everybody because I mean, for us,
sure, I can find very talented engineers and scientists and they will design a wonderful
solution. And then we'll go out in the world and wonder if this hammer we built has a nail
that corresponds to it. No, no, no, we need to talk to these people. Like, for example,
the fibers we produce, we found that we can produce chop stranded mat with them. Okay,
it's not textile yet, because we wanted to take the approach, we will remelt them as
well to produce long fibers. But first, we will not melt them and re blend them with
virgin fibers to make chop stranded mat. We want all the approaches, we should not be
dogmatic, we can do math that we're melting, which is obviously wonderful. But then we can
also we know this because we try produce long fibers by remelting them or glass wool installation,
because it works the same way. Now, recycle glass into glass wool installation, making
homes more efficient. It's also a good thing to do. Now, the mats we produced was not in
our lab only, we also produced it with Schumacher. It's a prototype, but they produced six meters
of it. And then it went, it was not enough. So we took it to Benito and Benito in their
yard, we did pieces with our mat. Again, it's not a series of boats, but it's pieces. Because
what was super important to us was your shipyard, and you have workers that do boats. For those
workers, the operating procedures should not be different, whether you use virgin or recycled
material, the resin should work the same way. The tools should be the same. If you're a
shipyard, and I'm telling you, you need to spend 300 pounds on new tools on new procedures
on new this on new that, just because it's recycled for the planet, you're never going
to go for it. So for us, we need that dialogue, because otherwise we produce something that
never works, you know, in reality, we're very happy with ourselves, but it's not realistic.
So there is that. And then I think in terms of recycling of plastics and composite materials,
to us, there is a very strong difference between using products from the oil as a fuel or to
make plastic. And to us, the approach, we don't believe at all at composite recycling
that there should be a ban on plastic. I mean, no, I mean, I'm not giving away my boat.
But the thing is, not using so much fuel, that makes more sense. But then it's our responsibility
to get the oil of a quality that is as high as possible to enable this.
And where do you feel sort of the burden of costs rests in this, right? Because you talked
about sort of the environmental viability, and touched on the economic viability, because
we're seeing different states and legislations kind of toying around with producer responsibility,
right? So if I'm a major fizzy drink manufacturer, and I produce however many cans of my fizzy
drink a year, ultimately, what happens to those fizzy drink cans at the end of life,
are my responsibility. And this is something a couple of countries have been playing with,
is that ultimately, the producer has the responsibility to recover and process end of life materials
hasn't really necessarily been entirely successfully passed yet. I know obviously the UK is a good
example of another country that's trying this out. But ultimately, how do you do that without
sort of breaking the whole system? Because if I said to you, right, you're a boat manufacturer,
you've now got to accept back all end of life boats under your brand and deal with them.
The cost of your procedure effectively increases, because whether it's collection storage, whatever
else as you mentioned, that cost ultimately will get passed on to the consumer, which
obviously affects your marketability of your products changes the demographic potentially
of who you can actually target and who is willing to buy your product because of the
increased cost. So is it on me or should it be on me as a boat owner? Do we incentivize
at that level so that when my boat is completely sad and unhappy, can't be used anymore? Am
I incentivized to dispose of it correctly? Should it be the producer, say it's a 1974
Swedish boat? I mean, it's a really tricky issue. It's not as if it was a pot of plastic
that you bought from a supermarket a couple of weeks ago. We're talking decades and decades
ago that we're potentially asking producers to take responsibility for. It's really complex,
right? So where does the incentive lie in the chain? Do you think or should it lie in
order for this to become perhaps more of a cohesive system with boats in particular?
So we wish we had the answer here in Switzerland. We don't. But we found a good answer that
was actually presented at the workshop in Brussels at the European Commission. The French,
they have implemented a, you know, they're very like the UK, they're big boat producers.
UK, we work very closely with the National Composite Centre and they do a tremendous
work on the subject. In France, they set up a system where, okay, the first, they taught
us this. So I didn't invent it. It's their research that has done this and they've done
an amazing work on that. The one who has the problem of end of life of boats is the last
owner of the boat. He's also the one or she who has the least money because when you talk
about a 40 or 50 year old boat, it's not the same budget as a brand new one. So they thought
this is unfair. And in order to fix this, we need to find who is responsible for putting
the boat on the water first. It's the first owner. And they happen to be the ones with
the most money. And if it's a rental company, they will also find I'm saying that so that
that can also help. So what they've done is they call it eco contribution. They have to
change the law in France for this. So whenever you register a new boat and my boat is registered
in the Mediterranean, so in France, and every year I pay a tax because my boat is with a
French flag. It's not a Swiss flag, it's a French flag. But I know that by paying this
tax at registration when it's new and every year, every boat that is registered in the
country, when I want to dispose of it, it won't cost me anything. They will come pick
it up and they will take it to a reconstruction center. It's actually a waste management company.
It's the same location where municipalities send their municipal waste and also where
they deal with vehicle racks, the car racks and stuff like that. That is important because
it means they already have the infrastructure to deal with oil, gas, diesel, all these things.
And that means retention floors, if it rains on it, you know, and so they take care of
that. They're paid to do this by the tax that was collected from my yearly fee that I pay.
The boats are typically they remove the what's worth money. So the mast is aluminum, typically
the engine is metal as well. They kill for a sailboat, you know, the railings, all these
things. And then they remove the wood. The wood can be chopped and then they do stuff
with it. That is like a key furniture stuff like that. They depolute the hulls, black
waters, diesel, oil, engine oil. And today they're left with the hull. Now this is where
it's interesting for us because we don't know how to take a boat and disassemble it. But
the composite is interesting to us. The composite from old boats is much more complex because
we don't really know what's been done over 40 or 50 years, what kind of paint has been
put on the boat. So it is more difficult. But this is a structure where it's not the
last owner of the boat that pays. And they're actually encouraged not to abandon their boats,
but to get rid of it. And you have these situations where you inherit the boat of your grandfather
who just passed away. What happens? Well, the boat is worth nothing. And you need to pay
10000 pounds for getting rid of it. You're not getting rid of it. You abandon it. They
had to change the law as well for depossessing the boats from their owners. Because on abandoned
boats, typically marinas and harbors are not ready to take the responsibility of destroying
someone else's property. Well, and lawsuits, what happens if you're the harbormaster and
then you say, there's 20 boats that occupy birds, they're not paying the rent. So it's
revenue I don't get because it's a lot of money that could pay for extra people in my
team. I'll get rid of them. I'll destroy them. And then two years later, someone comes from
I don't know, Latin America and says, you destroyed the boat of my grandfather. I'm
going to sue you. It's a huge responsibility. And they they're not equipped for that. It's
not at all what they're doing. So they had to pass a law that says that after I forgot
how many months, but after X months, if nobody's responding to our calls or the boat is deemed
abandoned, and we can destroy it. So when you start pulling the consequences of all
this, it really is much more than just the technology.
This isn't necessarily the first time something like this has been done. I mean, I appreciate
that different countries have different emotions, let's say around registering of boats. It's
not a legal requirement necessarily, certainly in the UK. So often you don't know who the
owner is, particularly when boats get abandoned. There hasn't been much appetite, particularly
within the sailing community to have boat registration. I think there's a bit of reticence
around it. However, we do it with cars, right? And we know if a car is abandoned, who it
belongs to, certainly who it's registered to, there's a central register obviously that
says, hey, that number plate is registered to Holly, she's dumped it, therefore, XYZ.
And there are obviously laws in place in a similar kind of context, which say, after
a certain amount of time, if this is abandoned on a public highway or otherwise, that we can
dispose of it. So there is already some areas of legal infrastructure existing, certainly
in Europe and the UK in particular, which can facilitate obviously a similar template
for boats. But I appreciate, like you've mentioned, it is new. And obviously the marine industry,
marine as harbor masters, whatever else aren't traditionally set up to cater for this as an
increasing issue. I think this is the point, right? It's increasing and it's more expensive.
It is. And I think it's the University of Brighton in the UK that has done a lot of research
on the consequences of Radio Canada have made a report on the consequences of abandon ships
in the water. And they just showed with this University, they find glass fibers in oysters.
I mean, so that really gets the attention of regulators, right? Because, yeah, as you
said, in the UK, there's no registration. So how do we fix this? It's, I say it's a
big issue, right? But it's a massive opportunity. I think that's the key thing. That's obviously
something that you and your co-founder have clearly identified as there is such a possibility.
And initially it is about joining the dots because as you mentioned, there's a scientific
solution or solutions in play with the industry that actually needs to employ them and industries.
I mean, we're not just talking about boats here, as you rightly pointed out at the very
beginning, whether it's wind turbine blades or car floors in high performance vehicles.
I mean, these materials are quite widespread beyond just marine itself. So there's certainly
a massive market in terms of providing an economically environmentally viable solution
to. Yeah, absolutely. The automotive industry
is under tremendous pressure because in the EU by 2030, so it's in six years time, five
and a half now, for each new vehicle, a quarter of the vehicle will need to be made of recycled
material. So that's a trend. And that conflicts directly with the opposite trend, which is
composites are about a third of the weight of the metal equivalent, especially when you
think of steel. So they're used to make cars lighter. And when they're lighter, it means
it's very good for electric cars. So if you think of an electric car, the battery of the
car is in a box under the car, and that box is made of composites. Hydrogen tanks, we work
on hydrogen tanks as well, they're made with composites. And all of this is because they
are lighter. And that means the car doesn't need such a big battery because it's lighter.
But then it's less recyclable because it's made of composite material. So there is a
paradox, but the trend is there. So we just need to make them recyclable.
But this is why it's exciting, right? If it was an easy answer, it wouldn't be innovative.
And I think that certainly why engineers are engineers and scientists are scientists, because
you will likely not get the perfect solution, but it certainly is a process of iteration
and design and redesign and new information and new research. And that I think it's an
incredibly exciting area, particularly because it is annoyingly new for marine in comparison
to other industries that are embracing some degree of this technology already.
Yeah, it is very exciting, where we're very cautious with is so many people over promise
that it's dangerous, that it gets the public away from a solution that is actually working.
And so we always look like we're too cautious. But okay, we start with production waste moving
on to all boats one step at a time. We know it's going to work. We know it's going to
happen. But we need to take it one step at a time. And you cannot say that without remelting
the glass, you can make new woven glass fibers. That's not true. You don't have the right
length. You can't say you can make carbon with the same properties. That's not true,
because you need to make long fibers with carbon. And you don't know how long the carbon
is going to be. Same for glass. So what's really important is, yes, it's possible. Yes,
it's wonderful. And it works very, very well. But it doesn't solve everything immediately.
And so that's why we need to be cautious. When you think of the future with this recycling
of glass fibers, now we officially partners with Alinghi. We're doing some work with them.
But not only Alinghi, we also work officially with Benito. We work with several boat manufacturers.
The next step, and we know it works, it's super exciting because this is crazy for the
boating industry, is the molds that give the shape of the boats. Those can be recycled.
You can take the mold and actually extract the glass fibers from them and do a new mold,
which means you don't need, when you have your shape of your hull, you don't need to
have your mold and then try to amortize with thousands of boats with the same shape, because
the mold at the end of its life, you don't know what to do with it. Instead, we can say,
if you want to change your design, we can take care of the mold, we give you new fibers,
and you make a new mold. So the economics of boat building are completely changing when
you think about this. Because all of a sudden, it gives you a flexibility in the design that
you can not do large series. You can just do small series, and it will not be that much
more expensive because there is a recycling solution.
Which is the key element, right? It has to be financially value driven as much as environmentally
value driven, as we've seen. If anything is much more expensive than the existing solution,
then it's very difficult to make it mainstream, as you know.
Yeah, but on the other hand, we're being asked, but you make business with our waste, you
should pay for it. If I pay you to do something, you're incentivized to do more. I want you
as a shipyard to produce less waste. That's your job. That's how you should improve your
procedures. So you need to pay for your waste, and you need to understand that there is a
cost and that cost so far has been too low. It's not acceptable to say, I'm going to
burn my composite waste so that it turns into smoke that goes into the neighboring countries.
That's not the way to deal with it. I should put it in the ground so that my grandkids
will still need to deal with the problem. That's not the way to deal with it. So waste
has a cost. We pay too little for that cost, and it should start to be, it should be in
the minds of people. I mean, I'm a boat owner. I have a sailboat. It's not a life and death
need. It's not like bread. It's a luxury thing. And as much as I love my boat, I can pay a
little bit more for recycling it at the end of its life. I think we should also take this
into account and we should be ready to say, you know what, if I can afford a boat, yes,
I can put a few hundreds and just know, if only for my peace of mind, that I'm also doing
something right.
So I think it's huge, isn't it? And I firstly, like Alinghi, incredibly cool, I gave, again,
no one will be able to see this, but I gave him a big chef's kiss at the mention of Alinghi.
Not that I don't respect Benito at all. I mean, obviously fantastic boats, but obviously
everyone's incredibly excited about the America's Cup later this year. So yeah, look forward
to that. So very cool. Congratulations on both.
Thank you. They are neighbors, you know, they're two kilometers away from us. So we know each
other really well.
Of course. Great team. Very exciting. I often sort of come into these conversations thinking,
okay, obviously looking for solutions, which is how, you know, I fortunately end up speaking
to people such as yourself and always think, you know, how far on we and why is this such
a big issue and how do we find a solution for it? But actually, you mentioned something
which is so applicable, which is it doesn't solve for everything. And actually, your solution
doesn't have to solve for everything, but the combination of various solutions. So let's
take, you know, when you're producing virgin composites, they're made recyclable firstly.
So that helps with that element of the whole production chain, that something such as your
kind of solution looks at production waste. So again, looking at the virgin material from
production, and then also at the end of life sort of solution, combined with the very designing
of the boats themselves, designing out waste, because arguably we should be more in control
of how much waste is a byproduct of the production process. Alongside the legislative shift that
you mentioned and the repositioning of responsibility of the consumer. I mean, this is an incredibly
fertile context in which to be looking at this problem as an opportunity. It's really
it's actually incredibly exciting to hear that there are so many pieces of this much
struggled over jigsaw puzzle that are really live and are really coming together to look
at this as something very immediate and very possible.
Absolutely. First, it's the R&D manager of another company who worked with the resident
producer Huntsman. And he said not long ago that the work we're doing together is basically
freedom to operate for the industry. Because all the shipyards in the marine industry,
the day that they can no longer get rid of their production waste, they're going to struggle
even to survive. So just the freedom to operate for the existing industry is one thing. The
end of life of the boats is another thing. And the last chapter, which we start to work
on at the moment is we're a young company, we're only three years old, but we've done,
I think, close to a 450 tests between 400 and 450 tests with everything, boats, planes,
cars, whatever. And that gives us a good idea of what works and what does not work, because
not all the tests work. If you put certain chemicals in your composites, it's going to
make them less recyclable. So what we do now, and it's really fun, is we are in the position
of prescribing. Okay, what can be done, for instance, switch to the helium resin from
our chemo. That one, we get close to 90% of the monomers to make directly resin with it.
That works super well. So switch from certain types of resin to other types of resin for
your new production, and you will make your next generation of boats more recyclable.
Same thing for the sandwich of your composites, use this material rather than this one. And
then people ask for this, we have manufacturers of resin for trains the other day that came
and said, can you help us do our resin more recyclable? So that is the next phase. So you
have production waste, end of life, and then design. And it's really exciting. It's really
fun.
Very, very cool. I think it's also because it's, you can see so tangibly how this is
coming together and it's working, particularly on the element of the designing out the waste.
If you said to someone, hey, design me a boat with, you know, less than 3% waste, that's
the design problem to be solved, you know, and I think that's the responsibility on all
of us to start thinking slightly differently when we're producing anything, whether it's
boats or not. I'm very excited for you, obviously being at the forefront of so much of this.
If you had one message or one takeaway for anyone listening to this podcast industry,
individual sailors or otherwise, what would it be?
Well, recycling of composites is coming. We're closing the loop, it's coming.
Short suite to the point. I like it, Gil. I want to say a huge thank you for joining me.
It's been an absolute pleasure and enlightening to talk to you about something that's long
plagued many people and obviously the marine industry in particular. And I'm very excited
to see what, how you develop obviously composite recycling, your company going forward certainly
over the next couple of years.
Guillaume Peben, co-founder of composite recycling in Switzerland. Thank you so much for your time.
Thank you very much, Mali. It's been my pleasure and thank you to everyone.
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