Sustainable Sails

What are Sustainable Sails?

There is a lot of talk about sustainability within the maritime industry, but how do we know that these claims are sensible, or just green-washing of unsustainable practices?

We have therefore developed a working definition of Sustainable Sails, to help ordinary sailors, as well as regulators and policy makers to understand what we think should be the industry gold standard for sustainability.

Aims of this definition

This definition aims to give us all something to work towards, which results in our sails becoming better for all users. This definition should push the industry towards sails which are:

1. More durable.

2. High performance, across their whole usable life.

3. Have clear environmental impacts, which are publicly available.

4. Have the lowest environmental impacts possible.

5. Are fixable and recut-able, across their lifetime.

6. Are recyclable at their end of life, to recover as much, if not all of the constituent chemistry.

Sustainable Sails

Using these aims, we define sustainable sails as:

Sails, for any size of vessel, which have the lowest environmental impact achievable across the product lifetime, while ensuring that these sails are durable, easy to fix and recut and have low, or no, drop in performance across their use-phase, while ensuring that these sails are easy to return to a fully circular economy at their end of life.