Composites recycling for the sports and maritime industries

Why composites?

Composites are a textile fabric, such as glass or carbon fibre, which has been kept in place by a plastic resin, such as epoxy or polyester resin. The resulting combination of fabric and plastic is a composite, which combines some of the properties of both the fabric and the plastic.

This means that they are strong and low weight, while also being easy to use make bespoke components with properties than can be vastly superior to metal components, which are still repairable in most cases. This means that composites are a common solution, particularly to challenges which require high performance materials at very low weight, such as car body work, boat hulls or even baths.

Unfortunately, these fabrics and resins are often made from petrochemicals and very few of them are recyclable at their end of life. This means that their use as a solution to decarbonise the world has been limited. 

When we started Sustainable Sailing in 2021, we were interested in recycling solutions for composites, especially for high-performance race sails. However, we have shown that if we can provide closed loop recycling of carbon fibre sails, we can also recycle many other composites currently on the market. This involves recycling not just the fabrics, but also the resins as well.

This is an important advancement

Closed loop recycling is possible for sails and we are now looking to extend out these technologies to be usable to recycle other problematic composites globally. If you are interested in our work to ensure that current composites product can be recycled at their end of life and future products are being designed for recyclability from the outset, get in contact.