Welcome back to the Clean Sailors podcast.
Let's talk about sailing, our marine industry and innovations towards getting 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 innovators, inventors, adventurers and
inspirational sailors, we're looking at those who are helping to change the way things are done.
As you may know through a few of our existing podcast episodes and notably through our resale
by Clean Sailors platform, End of Life Sails is a topic of real interest to me personally.
It all started with a mainsail from my grandfather's boat which after traversing the Biscay Atlantic,
Solent, Channel and offshore seas down to Cape Town, South Africa, had understandably lost
its integrity as a mainsail. But what to do with it? I set out trying to find opportunities,
solutions for End of Life Sails. There aren't any formal recycling schemes to be found anywhere in
the world but many small organisations have been working with sail material to make new things.
And so resale by Clean Sailors was born, a global platform connecting sailors in 11 countries with
over 36 projects that need and use old sails. But it's clear this isn't the long-term sustainable
opportunity, environmentally or economically. And now the political landscape is also shifting.
I'm excited to be speaking with Dr Joe Penhall-Smith and Sam Penhall, two clever minds working
towards recycling sails in the most direct meaning of the term recycling. Joe, Sam,
pleasure to have this conversation with you. There is so much to discuss on this topic
and I'm prepared again to have my mind popped on a few areas.
Thank you very much. Now it's great to speak to you.
Let's start with who you are and what you stand for.
We are a pure recycling company. I say pure in the sense that we take the sails and we
break them down and turn them into their kind of base chemicals or if they've got album fibers in
them, we extract those fibers. So it's really taking everything back to its most basic form
of compound. So why are you doing this? This kind of started for me with the America's Cup
being down in Auckland and working for Ilios. And after the end of that cup, we packed up huge
amounts of composites and particularly the sails. I mean, there were sails that we never even put
on the boat that were packed into this container and shipped back to the UK. And to the best of
our knowledge, they're still sitting in Chichester. So at that point, I went to Joe and said,
look, what can we do? Is there something we can scientifically do to try and solve this massive
issue that sailing has? And he kind of went away and found this really cool bit of text that he
could develop and build on. And for us, it really comes back to that love of sailing and having always
been sailors from being very young. And Joe, what's your goal? At the end of the day, the world needs
to change quite fundamentally over the next 20 or 30 years to quite dramatically decarbonize.
And we need to have a much more positive relationship with our local environment and the globe.
And one of the big ways that we see is to achieve that is to develop this kind of
circular economy. There's no point in digging oil out the ground, turning into things and then
dunking them afterwards. That's just a whole waste of time and effort. But if we can develop this
circular economy, so when things come offline, they go back into the start of the system,
that not only eliminates the to dig oil out of the ground at the first place, but it also
dramatically cuts your carbon emissions, while simultaneously having a really positive environmental
impact because you're not putting anything into landfill. And that's ultimately kind of our aim
is to develop that even in a very small scale, sales, composite, more generally system is developing
that and leading on to the kind of the positive end results. And sales is one thing that you're
I appreciate starting with. But this is technology that you talked about scaling through end of life
boats, potentially even the automotive industry and sort of wind turbines. This is almost all
encompassing once you start scaling it. Yeah, I mean, that's what we hope. Because although a piece
of car looks very, very different to a sale, from a Hemis point of view, actually, they're very similar.
They all use carbon fibers, they all use resins. So if you can have a way that breaks one of them
down, suddenly that can cascade and you can do a whole load of other similar things as well.
I'm smiling at you because it reminds me of those sort of little clips that you hear about Darwin
explaining that we've got more in common with the banana than we do with the chimpanzee. And it
just reminds you that fundamentally, there is a relatively finite number of building blocks
that we have on the planet, right? So everything is everything else, somehow, certainly intertwined.
In terms of your obviously the scalability, it's a huge element. But coming back to sales
themselves, we know that obviously there's a variety of different materials and they undergo
a variety of different processes, not least because sale makers are looking at new technology
in ways of compressing and heat pressing rather than gluing sales, for example.
But fundamentally, as a tech style, what are the bare composites of most sales? What are they made of?
So virtually all of your sales are made out of polyester. So the same kind of underpinning
chemistry as polyester clothes, you produce large quantities of polyester and you spin into a fiber
and you then weave that fiber. The point where it becomes a little bit more complex is that you then
mostly bind it in place with an additional binding resin. So for Dacron, the Dacrons
could be using their brand name, but we collectively use it to describe all polyester
cell bluffs. That's polyester fibers banded in place with a melamine resin. So that's a composite
with polyester melamine. But you can use that same composite process. So the same fiber with a binding
resin routine. If you replace the polyester fibers with carbon fibers or ultramelacorate
polyethylene or aramids, and you can still, instead of binding out in place with a melamine resin,
you bind in place with a polyester resin instead. So the underpinning chemistry is polyester and
something else. The obvious only kind of exception to that is spinnakers, which are made actually
not along with a polyurethane binding resin it plays. But it is of course quite often the binding
resin and the coatings attached to that binding resin that cause you the problems in the first
place. It's called straightforward to recycle polyester. You can just chop it up and melt it
and re-spin the polyester. There are problems with that process. It's never perfect, but it does work.
The problems mostly come in when you start adding other things to the system. At the moment you start
adding other things to the system, interfere either with your chopping process, your melting process,
your breaking down the chemistries within the system processes. So you end up needing a recycling
solution, which is incredibly agnostic. It doesn't really matter what you throw into your recycling
system. It just has to be able to break that apart in some way, shape or form. So we had to move
away from like your methyl-alysis, glycol-assist, and even your pyro-assist to breast-alysis,
which is much more generic and much more useful. Which is why you're then able to scale it through
different industries and different treatments. Because as you said, the fundamental building
blocks of a car versus a boat versus a sail versus a turbine may be similar, but ultimately the
treatment of such material has been so significantly different in its ultimate use. Exactly.
And why is that so exciting for recycling in general? Because this is a big opportunity with
sales, as I mentioned, in our four years of investigation, or through the industry and beyond,
there are no formal sail recycling facilities anywhere in the world yet. So why is this exciting?
Well, no, exactly. Like you say, this is the first of its kind. This has never actually been done
before. So a few years ago, I was working for various sailing teams and we ended up loading in
loads of sales into containers and they got shipped around the world and they just sit there.
Basically, they don't go anywhere because these sales can't be repurposed for other boats.
Occasionally, they could be made into bags and things like that, but there's only really kind
of 1% of the market that that actually happens for. So I then went to Joe and said,
is there a solution we can find for this? Is there something out there that can be done?
And he is much more than I am. So he has got away and over the past three years now,
we've developed this system which can break down these really complex resins that bind all the
carbon fibres, Kevlar fibres together to make these sales so strong.
I think the key thing you mentioned, Sam, though, is the fact that we're talking about
such a variety of material, not just sail by sail and sail's purpose, but also the fact that any one
sail has a variety of different composites and materials woven into that one sail to give it
the integrity, the hardiness, the longevity that it needs to operate in some of the world's toughest
environments. So we're talking about probably some of the most complex materials on the planet.
Like you say, these things go around the world multiple times. I mean, take a cup sail or a
one day sail, for example, they have just in the fibres, they've got Kevlar's, they've got
pyramids, they've got twarons, technoras, of course, the carbon fibre, and all of that is
interwoven in the sail and then all bound together with a polyester resin, unlike a fabric, like a
clothing fabric, which again is polyester, but doesn't have any of these other more complicated
materials in it. Spanning that complexity, it is that kind of huge range that was the kind of thing
that made us kind of get quite excited about this, because if you're spanning that continuum from
the kind of very basic Dacrons, which are much closer to clothing fabrics, than all the way up to
your kind of carbon composite sails, the kind of cup sails are chemically speaking closer to a
wind turbine than they are to a piece of clothing, even if they're still a fabric. But if you have
a recycling solution, which can deal with that continuum, it means you've actually got a recycling
solution that can also deal with textiles and wind turbines, or a divide boats, or anything
else that's chemically relatively similar to a sail. And I can see for you, Joan, particularly with
your scientific background, I can see how that in particular is a very juicy opportunity to start
literally dissecting some of the most complex compositions of materials, right? How does one
even go about beginning that process? Because we've talked about this in the past, the danger is
obviously creating a process that in itself is highly energy intensive, which almost negates the
purpose of recycling something in the first place, or you're producing the kind of feared chemical
soup as a result, which in itself is a waste product, which is particularly potent and toxic
potentially that you then also have to do something with. So those in itself provides a really
exciting parameters for you, for anyone else that I can see it's been intimidating, which is why it's
not been done before. And I appreciate you guys are cracking it. So how did you even start the
process of dissecting this material? And what is the process as far as you can actually discuss and
allude to it? I mean, it's that kind of total challenge, right? You need a very agnostic recycling
solution, which means that it doesn't matter what you put in, provide you take the process
conditions right, you'll get back what you expect to get out of it, and you get back all of it,
the overwhelming majority of it. What we ended up running with was a super heated steam based
recycling solution. So relatively high temperatures and pressures, water stops behaving like
what do we get sailing on to drink, and it starts behaving in a chemically very interesting manner
and chemically very complex manner. And it stops behaving like water, as you would see, and it
starts behaving a bit more like a very effective way of unraveling polymers, different plastics,
very quickly and very efficiently. And because it's water, it will still have that level of
reactivity as well. So you have access to not just pyrolysis where you're heating some of the
art, you don't just have access to facts very hot, you also have access to like the water as a
catalyst, water is can take possible reactions as well. So you end up with four or five different
mechanisms that you can tailor to then very rapidly unravel the thing you put into it. So that's
how you'll adapt to alcohol, alcohol, fiber. And also, the nice thing about water is we've been
dealing with water purification, we've been dealing with water recovering things from water
since humanity has existed. So there's a lot of technology available at very high levels of
effectiveness, you can then apply to a your water based system to also then not just recycle the
thing you put in, but recover all those building blocks and then reassemble it subsequently.
This is the exciting element of it and something you're going to have to explain a little bit
further for my smaller scientific mind is that the principle of the building blocks, right?
Because Sam, you mentioned things that were in a sale at the beginning of this conversation that
I've never heard of before. I mean, obviously, you're used to the sort of notion of the substance
such as Kevlar, but that itself is made up presumably of a variety of building blocks,
like most things. So when you're talking about reducing our sales as an example,
down to the building blocks, you're talking about the fundamental bits and pieces that don't just
only belong to sales, but can belong to a variety of different industries, products,
ultimately that can be made out of them, right? Exactly. So the sales chemically are very similar,
like Joe said, to a lot of other things. So when you break down any polyester based thing,
whether that's clothing, wind turbines, or the sale, you get back the kind of two basic compounds,
one which is pterothalic acid and the other is ethylene glycol. So these two building blocks
are used for roughly one third of all plastics produced on earth. So any PET plastic are made
up of those two chemicals. So from there, you can imagine that if we have those building blocks
from a recycled source, suddenly the potential there is huge. So we could then take that and
we've shown it can be turned back into low-deadstee PET and then from there, it can be taken into
anything, right? You've condensed it down and you turn it into chips and then those chips can be
put into water bottle manufacturer, clothing manufacturer, you name it, it can probably be done.
In terms of the process, when you're breaking sales down into the building blocks, what's the
integrity of each of those building blocks? Because they've obviously been sales and you put them
through a high pressure, high steam process to get them re-blocked, let's say, as their individual
kind of blocks. So let's take the acid, for example, or the glycol. What's the integrity of that? Is
it almost as if it were virgin or has it naturally lost some of its integrity by virtue of already
having been a sale and having undergone this extensive steam and heat process? Dr. Joe?
So it's maybe not the best way to think about it as don't think about it as a physical structure,
think about it a bit more like LEGO bricks. So think about as you effectively have TPA as a
blue LEGO brick and EG as a LEGO brick. And those bricks are the most stable form of those
building blocks. So if you want to then build yourself a sale, you need to assemble a large
collection of LEGO bricks. But if you then take it all apart, the smallest entity you get from that
is your red and blue blocks. So provided that you don't have too much of the stuff in your
disassembled sale, so green LEGO bricks to extend the metaphor, it's quite straightforward then to
just reassemble the LEGO bricks afterwards. And conveniently as well, because they're in this
metaphor different colors, they behave slightly different chemically, it's quite straightforward
to then remove particularly the kind of added coatings that a lot of other plastic manufacturers
will add to adding in a lot of the additives. It's quite easy to strip out green LEGO bricks,
just get back the red and the blue they originally started with.
That's the big thing, isn't it? Because as we've talked about, sales are made from such complex
variety of materials. So the different types of sales, the different types of boats and
news cases, the different age, I mean, there are still sales and circulation that are 40,
50 years old if they've either not been used or have been exceptionally well looked after.
So are there a specific type that you're able to work with preferably or is it something that can
apply to all sales? No, I mean, it's all sales. So whether it's like I said, because you're breaking
down into its most fundamental parts, it almost doesn't matter what's happened to it beforehand,
whether it's a almost brand new sale which has been used 10 times and ripped or whether it's
one of the 50 year old sale that's been a really hard life because you can break them down into
their building blocks, you can use any of them really. You make it sound so simple chaps, but
that would sort of rely the extensive research and testing and iterations that you both have gone
through over time to get this to where you are now. I mean, where are you in the process of
bringing this to life? Because obviously, and we'll talk about the sort of political and legislative
environment in a second, but in terms of this being a prototype tested otherwise scalable,
where are you in that process and what are you looking for? Yeah, so at the minute we're
operating up in the north of the UK on around a two ton scale annually. So some of that we're
getting from sales, some of that's manufacturing waste from sale makers, and we're really using
this as a way to build a really good data bank so that currently the system is very small,
so that when we go and build our main facility, our next facility, it will be able to operate at
nearly 20 tons annually with the option of kind of building that out. That's where we're looking
at the minute for to try and find the right investment from hopefully within the sailing
industry to really be able to push it to the next level so that we're not just a very niche bit so
that we can properly impact the industry. But yeah, it's just finding that investment is our next big
step really. Well, I think also you're doing something that hasn't been done before. I mean,
we're in 2024, forgive me. Sales have been around for a long time. Plastic has been around for a
little less than that, but certainly long enough. You're doing something that's not insignificant
and the opportunities are obviously endless because as you've described, you're looking at
the most complicated, which means that you can apply it to sales but also as Joe mentioned,
to a variety of different industries all the way up to potentially composites and otherwise for
wind turbines and stuff. So the practicality is very evident. It's almost as if is the industry
itself ready for it yet, which brings us on to our next topic nicely. I mean, we're talking about
sale material as if it was its own specific entity in itself, which it is, but it also is a textile,
right? I mean, largely it is a fabric and you've alluded to the sort of fashion industry and polyester,
etc. We're talking about very, very complex form of textile, aren't we? And we know that
the fashion industry, the textile industry in particular has come under a lot of scrutiny
in the last decade for just sheer volume of waste, but also on a recyclability, let's say,
certainly at scale. Not to say that it can't be recycled, but rather it hasn't been yet.
And obviously that's the problem that you're trying to solve. And if the marine industry
hasn't yet or sale makers haven't yet moved to scalable solutions themselves or invested in
scalable solutions for recycling their materials, we're in a context now where we're almost being
forced to make that change. Do you want to talk to us a little bit about particularly the UK legislation,
but actually as we're seeing across Europe around producer responsibility and how we're now seeing
a change in almost government and legislative responsibility around who should be looking
after old sales? Yeah, I think the kind of lead into that is that the particularly EU and the UK
are moving much more heavily in favor of extended producer responsibility legislation.
So currently, the last person to own that sale jacket, t-shirt, whatever, that's the person who
is currently responsible financially and legally for the disposal of that. If destroyed the sale,
that t-shirt has had too long a life, whatever. And that has made it quite tricky to run a
recycle system because, functionally, you're dealing with the last person in the chain who is
the least likely to have any capacity to pay for or manage or necessarily expertise to manage that
product standard. As you said, sales are hugely chemically complex entities. We can't necessarily
expect you to have gone away, understood the fundamental chemistry and they go, oh, right,
the way to recycle this is to do this. So instead, the EU and UK are starting to move towards
producer responsibility style legislation. So as a salemaker, you instead pay, effectively pay for
disposal of that ahead of time. So you pay a small amount every time that you make a sale,
and that then gets held by a producer responsibility organization to provide
recycling solutions, end of life solutions, not just for to drive recycling, but also
to make sure that the people who need those second hand sales can get them. You need those,
that cloth for bags can get access to all this still. So you end up with this kind of secondary
ecosystem around the life of that product. The challenge from our perspective, from the kind
of marine industry perspective is that sales on textiles, sales of legally textiles, sales of
typically textiles, sales are considered under all the textile based legislation, which does
lead to the sloppy, interesting tension where if we're not careful, sales off particularly,
but some composites as well, will get sucked into a wider textiles based management speaker system,
which is likely to mean it will mean that these products don't get managed really at
end of life because we're a fraction of the fashion industry, for example, there's an interesting
tension at Flaity currently in terms of the development of this legislation.
In itself, it's obviously something that we've discussed at previously France are quite far
ahead with in terms of boat manufacture. So you know, when you're buying the boat, a brand new
boat, you're now paying a premium for the end of life treatment of that boat, right? Because
you're right, by the time I bought my boat, which is, I'm probably like the fifth owner in a 40 year
period, and the value of the boat normally has depreciated, I'm the least interested in, honestly,
in terms of taking responsibility for what to do with it, because ultimately, there aren't any
solutions currently at scale that can deal with that, which is why you see those behaviors such
as dumping stuff and landfilling stuff, because it's cheap, it's easy, and it isn't monitored,
or at least legislated against. So I hear you in terms of the end of life and actually shifting
that responsibility actually back to the first owner in some cases, but ultimately also the
producer. So if I produce the material, it's also my responsibility to deal with it when it's no longer
useful in that guy's as a material, or at least would be landfillable, essentially.
But the interesting thing is also how it's also changing the nature of how we're producing things,
right? Because is this legislation not also challenging material producers and how they
label stuff, right? The center which they're using recyclable materials in their products,
the reduction of hazardous waste or hazardous materials. I mean, we're talking even with sales,
I wouldn't eat or sleep with or wear any of those materials that it's made with, but just by virtue
of their chemical compounds, right? So there is also this big push towards being more transparent
about what goes into the production. And it's quite a change. I mean, this is going to be quite a
substantial change because as we've discussed, this is going to be imminent. And the industry
itself is not particularly well set up yet, right? Yeah, exactly. This is coming in, this will be
in some way, shape or form law every country in the EU. It's already the Circuit Economy Bill in
Scotland, the Circuit Economy Acts now in Scotland. There's the Deffery equivalent through the UK,
and the EU Circuit Economy Bill will be finalized at the end of this year, or implementation in the
next year, possibly beginning of January, kind of January, February 26, depending on where it gets
implemented. So yeah, this is coming. This is inevitable. The Marine industry fairly seriously
needs to start jaging with this positively, because otherwise, it's going to get sucked into much
wider, much broader piece of legislation, which just won't deliver recycling solutions for the
things that has to identify our real problems. And or be faced with penalties as a result of not
adhering to the legislation, right? Certainly in the couple of years following the passing of the
legislation, at least the implementation of it at scale would be there, you know, the penalties
for not actually adhering to it. We're talking about production lines that have existed for decades,
and we notably, let's say, as a crude mark of the 50s, 60s, when plastic production in the
marine industry really found its grounding. So we're talking about a very well set up production
line of manufacture and finishing and maintenance, having to shift within really 12 months to
thinking quite differently about its end of life materials. In your experience so far, guys,
is the industry moving fast enough, let's say? Is anybody ready?
No, not at all, really. And I think some of that probably comes down to, to take the sailing
industry, for example, sale makers are very good at designing and building sales. But they're not
material scientists. They fundamentally don't know chemically what's in their sales, I don't
believe, from all of the ones that we've spoken to over the years. They don't understand that these
things are the same as textiles or wind turbines. So getting to a solution isn't always easy for
somebody who doesn't have that background. So when we come in and say, ah, now we have a solution,
it takes a while to educate people to show them that these are uncommon materials, these are things
that are very common across the world. So there are solutions out there and we can prevent this
from going to landfill. And now, basically with legislation, we are being forced to do that.
And it's just trying to accelerate that education and that knowledge across the industry really to
show that bearing your head in the sand isn't going to work forever.
But I think, like you said, I mean, obviously, I appreciate one of us on this call,
who's got a doctorate in the subjects in which we're studying. Actually, you're trying to translate
that. I mean, when you're explaining to it, obviously, it makes practical sense describing it.
But you're talking exactly like you're talking about a whole industry, you've done things a
certain way for a long time who've never needed to understand the detailed complexity of what makes
up the fabric which they're using ultimately for the end purpose. I mean, they're engineers in
terms of cell making and design and production and had a great conversation with the CEO of OneSales
and one sentence of his that really stuck with me, Dere de Luca, was the fact that there is no
school of cell making. You don't go and get educated as a cell making because you're passionate
and you learn in a lot. So it's a very unique and niche area, I think, not just within the
industry but globally in general. But what is your then ask or your ideal circumstance? So you've got
this, the potential for this to become a very, very scalable practical solution, presumably at
relatively low cost in comparison to what cell makers would have to facilitate themselves in
order to garner all of their materials back, store it, presumably clean it, either break it
down or reuse it or start up new lines of garments or bags or whatever else that we've also seen in
the industry, which ultimately then just prolongs that issue, doesn't it? Because they would still
then be responsible for the end of life, whatever that may be in however many years.
What is the ideal solution? If you could say, this is what the industry should look like in 12
months time, ideally, what would that be? So we're starting to see the collection points. So what we
would really like to see is all cell makers getting on board with customer cell collection points,
add their lofts, whether that's a trade in scheme, something like that, however they work that,
so that their customers can bring back their old sales, drop them in at a sale loft,
and then we'll deal with them from there. We can then take them away for recycling.
Cell makers, we'd like to work with more of them on managing their waste streams,
because of course, when you produce a sale, there's quite a lot of waste. We can deal with all of
that so that doesn't have to go to landfill as well. So getting those systems and processes
in place in a practical sense with cell makers takes time. So we'd like to really
start the ball rolling and get that in place. Yeah.
Because there's a big difference obviously as all between the virgin cell material from production
that you're leading to, which is offcuts of various sizes, various materials. Pretty simple. In
comparison to old sales coming in, where you have to debatten, take all the bits and pieces off it,
I mean, that's in itself is part of a quite extensive work stream, isn't it, of getting a
sale ready for recycling at your end? Yes. So when we get a sale, it will strip off as much of the
metal components as we can. It'll then be chopped up, whether that's manually or we're looking at
shredders and finding much more mechanical ways of doing it now, which is easier rather than sitting
there for hours on end with scissors. So yeah, there is a cost to get rid of those sorts of things.
And we would like that not to sit with the customer. We'd like sale makers to try and
take that responsibility. But of course, we understand there's got to be a balance of the
customer might have to pay something to drop off a sale to get it to recycling.
But it's that very tricky area, isn't it? Because you also want to motivate the right kind of
behaviors. If I know it's going to cost me 100 quid to drop off my sale for recycling at my local
sale loft, and it's free to put it in landfill, we need almost like the entire ecosystem really tight
on this being a non land fillable material ultimately, or do you work with the local,
you know, like the local tip, etc, which is responsible for collecting a variety of different
materials and different buckets. Because it's a very, we know it's highly contested. We know that
also from from boats, people dump them because it's expensive, even to get it, you know, towed
up to a landfill site somewhere and have the keel pulled off and someone have that and whatever
else. Most people haven't got the time, the energy, nor they want to spend the money on it.
So it really needs to be quite a tight ecosystem, doesn't it, in terms of monitoring and kind of
regulation, dare I say, to make sure that we're actually driving the right behaviors. And it's
difficult because I know what you're leading to, Sam, is the fact that if I'm a sale maker, and I've
never got to deal with all of my anything that I've ever produced, I've got to take it back
and do it at the end of the life. It's going to cost me money, de facto. What most producers do
is pass that cost on to the customer, normally indirectly, so they'll put up the cost of the
prices, they'll put up the cost of sale making, they'll put up the cost of, you know, maintaining
and washing and everything else to help cover this new legislation requirement. So it is murky,
right? But I think the key point is it's coming, like it's here.
And I think the thing to balance that up with is that because this is coming,
it's a case of paying a small amount now to manage an existing solution, build my ecosystem today,
tomorrow, or run the risk that we're paying not just double triple the price to manage the sales
at the end of life, but 10, 15, 20, 100 times in some cases, because that ecosystem hasn't been built,
it hasn't been allowed to develop. And particularly in places like Germany, we're already seeing
explicit composites landfill bans and quite dramatic increase in landfill taxes in the rest
of the UK, Europe. Jumping these into landfill is not going to be a solution for more than a year
or two. It's a case of move now and expect to pay a bit tomorrow, or don't move and be 10 years behind.
10 years behind and broke, if not, is still in existence at all, the way things will go. I hear
you. I mean, it's it's crudely, it's business, isn't it? Let's say, for example, I drop a
bailed sale, you strip out the bits and pieces or the sale off does, it goes off for recycling,
it's turned into its crude elements again, elements being the wrong word, I appreciate talking to
a site and but the crude blocks again, what can you then do with those blocks? So you've alluded
to the fact that they can go off to be made into a low density PET. So you can then sell that those
building blocks effectively to different industries that can then make the most of them again. Is that
right? And back to the sale making sale cloth making industry presumably. Exactly. And our long
term vision and what would be absolutely fantastic is if we could break down a Dacron sale, for example,
break that down into its monomers, its building blocks, sell that or send that to a yarn manufacturer.
So then that would get re spun into new Virgin Dacron. And that would then get back into the
whole ecosystem again. So that is our absolute ideal scenario. Before we get there until we get
there, we'll get there eventually. These monomers, these compounds will just go back into the plastics
industry basically, and help reduce the amount of these building blocks that get synthesized from
crude oil. Choosing the Virgin. Exactly. We are also working with the University of Edinburgh,
Dr. Joanna Sadler's lab, the minute to look at other uses. So instead of putting new plastics
back into the plastics industry, we're doing a lot of work in the minute around ways of using those
as starting points to produce materials for the kind of where we see the future of the
particularly composites industry going for the kind of wider kind of commodity chemicals
market going. So she's done a lot of very exciting work with us over the last couple of years around
reducing the compounds like fresh catechia and vanilla. So compounds which are very useful for
making recyclable resins, for example, using genetically engineered organisms to effectively
consume those building blocks and produce out at the end of that these are much more highly
useful compounds such as a little bit more small scale, but that has been an innovative
UK funded project over the last, so it's running for the next couple of years. There are other
things that we can do rather than just produce the same plastics again, like we can produce
much more useful things for the materials for the future economy. I think what's been kind of
exciting about the work that you guys have done and are doing is the fact that not only is it
pioneering number one, it's ready ahead of a very important deadline for the industry number two,
but you can see how it actually makes so tangible what a fully circular system should look like
that it can exist, that you're taking obviously products, reducing them down into their building
blocks to be made again into the same thing if necessary and also other things. And that's actually
the concept of circular economy is very abstract at times because it's actually quite hard to
achieve as you appreciate. And whilst we've got sale makers such as one sales in particular who've
developed sales which they themselves can break down and recycle, actually being able to do this as
an industry wide regardless of where they come from, even if I wanted to make my own, you guys
could recycle it. And I think that's why it's exciting. I don't advocate legislation leading
the way, but I think it's incredibly useful in sort of kicking an industry society into action
on a particular topic because clearly we can't go on the way that we have been doing with the way
that we are consuming resources and the scale at which we're doing it now.
No, absolutely. And like you say, it's always hard, isn't it, when you've got that kind of balance
between legislation and of course we don't want it because it can be damaging. But at some point,
the industries need a kickstart, need to kind of get that motivation to become more sustainable,
to take that next big step forward. And I think that will hopefully when this comes in, that'll
give the marine industry that jumpstart to really look at what materials they're using and how we
can prevent them from going to landfill and creating circular economy.
And what is your ask of individual sailors and boaters currently? What would you like us to
be doing differently or thinking about? So I think some of that is putting pressure on
sailmakers to find a solution. So if you're going for a new sail, speak to the sailmakers, say,
right, what happens to my old sail? How much waste are you producing? Just ask those questions and
put that pressure on them as well. We're also starting a sail pledge. So what that is, is we
are asking people to let us know what sail they've got, kind of where they are, what they're made
from. That'll hopefully then give us a really good picture of how we get them, how we can collect them
from somebody in Coralwall to somebody in Edinburgh. And it's back to that thing of kind of reducing
that friction so that giving them to us is easier than putting them in landfill. So do we send a
truck around or do we do collection points at sailing clubs? Building that picture for us,
I think, is really important so that we can work out who we need to partner with in our
scale up efforts. And you're made to ask of the industry. I guess just question things, right?
I mean, question, what is it that you're using to build these sails? Is there a better material out
there? In the short term, doing research, yes, it may cost more, but in the long term, what's your
business's priority? Is it making money in the short term? Is it building a fantastic sail?
Hopefully it's building a product that can last a long time and have minimal environmental impacts.
I think we're, especially as countries start to shift towards kind of net zero efforts,
businesses are going to have to transition to becoming more sustainable and having that
mentality shift of planet first rather than profits, really.
Disrupting business models as much as the industry as a whole, it's a big deal.
Yeah, not an easy thing to do. But I think it's like, as we said, and as we go back to it,
it almost is to close, it's almost this is coming. So it's either move or be moved. And the being
moved is going to be more expensive. It's going to be perhaps disenfranchising. You from the
industry is going to impact the business a hell of a lot by not thinking about this until it's
almost too late. So I think that's a very poignant, if not somewhat, quite intense note to end on is
this is the sailmaking industry in particular changing as it is also the boat building. And
otherwise, the marine industry is about to be significantly shaken up, obviously for the better
in the long term, and notably because also it has been demonized, if not increasingly demonized by
virtue of the materials it's using, but also because it's the right thing to do. And we can't
afford to do it the same way anymore. Can I ask one last question of the doctor, Joe?
I would be very remiss to not bring up the almost like the byproducts of the process and what can't
be reused. What is the waste from the system that you're looking to introduce? There is very,
very little waste from the system, which is the nice thing. So where you might deal with
a lot of our kind of competitors who run similar recycling solutions will end up with somewhere
between 20 and 50% of that becoming waste. We're comfortably into sub 10%. And we're already looking
at the final kind of added extras where you potentially look at that just kind of tweaking
those conditions to drop that by 1%. So conveniently, very little waste to worry about.
It is comparatively, what do you do with the waste and what can be done with the waste? And I know
that's perhaps a slightly uncomfortable question, but this is chemical matter or let's say building
block matter, which is a mush that just can't be applied anywhere. Not really, actually, what you
end up with is a very small fraction of child formation. So effectively, the crispy bits at
the bottom of your frying pan, and you can obviously responsibly dispose of those in the
same way you would do with your waste from a frying pan. In practical terms, we're currently working
with a couple of partners to look at a couple of slightly kind of more elegant alternative
options than putting it in effectively food waste. So there are a couple of other options.
Practically, though, we won't try and minimize the amount of child formation generally,
because as you say, it's not wildly helpful, it's not wildly useful.
But it's impressive. I think just the notion of having less than 10% waste of the process that
you're going through, given the complexity of the subject matter, e.g. the sales, is pretty
impressive in itself. I'm very excited to continue this conversation and to see where
the industry ends up, certainly with the Linux 12 to say 18 months in particular.
It's exceptional technology that you're working on, and there's been an absolute pleasure speaking
with you today. So Dr. Joe Penhall Smith and Sam Penhall, thank you so much for your time and for
joining me on this episode of the Clean Sailors podcast. Thank you very much. It has been a pleasure.
You've been listening to the Clean Sailors podcast for information on all episodes.
And for more about Clean Sailors, head to clean sailors.com. Thank you for listening and see you
for the next episode.