The material wealth of superyachting

“There are two big passions in my life – the environment, and sailing,” begins Jeroen Wats, founder and Chief Innovation Officer at ExoTechnologies. As a sailor-turned-boatbuilder who has produced some 600 yachts over the past 17 years, Wats slowly began to recognise a disconnect in those passions. “It was becoming a very difficult discussion where you do something really cool like build super-cool sailing yachts, but at the other end there are no end-of-life solutions for carbon or glass-reinforced plastic (GRP). And it’s not only boats,” he adds, “it’s things like wind turbine blades, and myriad other parts that are built in GRP – in Europe alone in 2020 it is estimated that 250 million kilos of GRP was added to landfill, and it’s only going to get worse.”

After coming to this realisation, Wats sold his company and set out to develop a composite to replace GRP which could meet four key requirements – it should be sustainable, it should be ridiculously strong, it should be affordable, and it should have an end-of-life solution by being circular, or fully recyclable.

After investing £3 million in research and development, and after what Wats describes as  “two years of breaking materials, breaking my head, swearing a lot, and drinking a lot of coffee”, Wats and his partners have managed to develop a GRP alternative that can replace GRP in the boatbuilding process without having to retrain lay-up and laminator teams, and without having to replace equipment, with an end cost of production just one per cent more than GRP. Currently in the patenting process, the material is called Danu – after the Celtic earth-mother goddess – and it really does appear to offer a future for GRP yachts and superyachts, as well as for industries far beyond marine.

“You can get all the materials back to the virgin state, and Danu doesn’t lose any of its mechanical properties in the recycling phase, making it circular,” Wats explains. “So from a boat you could make a wind turbine blade, and from a wind turbine blade you can make a chair, so the material stays in the economy and not in landfill.” To prove the point, Wats and his company have developed a 32-foot offshore One Design race yacht designed to meet the criteria for a new Olympic sailing class, while also meeting the Olympic committee’s commitment of a yacht that is 90 per cent recyclable by the 2028 summer games.

Wats is not the only one making great strides toward a more sustainable future, and shipyards around the world are exploring innovative solutions and new materials to create next-generation yachts, often driven by forward-thinking owners. For example, Innovation Yachts in France has been exploring the use of Filava, a fibre developed by Belgian company Isomatex which takes crushed basalt – volcanic rock – and heats it to very high temperatures before extruding it through microscopic nozzles to create continuous fibres that are stronger than steel. The power required per kilo of material means it is more sustainable than traditional glass fibre.

Finnish builder Baltic Yachts has also been experimenting with new materials, and in 2021 launched Pink Gin Verde, a 68-foot performance sailing yacht for which the owner demanded innovation across the board. “We’ve been reacting to customer demand and we began working on the details of the Café Racer in 2019,” says Henry Hawkins, Executive Vice President of Baltic Yachts. “Our desire and ability to adapt to the technical demands of an eco-friendly yacht have resulted in an extremely exciting product.”

The result is a yacht that features naturally grown flax as reinforcement in the hull, recycled plastic bottles in non-structural panel cores, a sustainable, durable cork deck as an alternative to teak, hydrogeneration while sailing, and solar panels in the coachroof top – which means that Pink Gin Verde can essentially sail and run her systems fossil-free.

Even traditionally sustainable methods still have their place, and perhaps the ultimate example of what can be achieved has been taking shape in Turkey over the past decade. The astonishing Dream Symphony project, under construction at the Dream Ship Victory yard, is an ultra-modern, 141-metre long, four-masted sailing superyacht that is being built by hand using a cold-moulded wood laminating technique. This vast project will ultimately use 2,500 cubic metres of iroko wood, all sourced under a sustainability programme of replanting.

Such thinking is no longer the preserve of individual owners and visionary shipyards, however, and the industry as a whole is waking up to the importance of environmental planning, particularly in the consideration of the entire supply chain. It’s why the Water Revolution Foundation (WRF) is working on a database of sustainable solutions that ultimately should allow yards to know which products, services and solutions meet their own – and their clients’ – growing sustainability demands.

“A life cycle assessment is a powerful tool to quantify and underline the potential reduction of environmental impact by using recyclable or even reusable alternatives,” explains Jelena Dolecek, a sustainability engineer at WRF. “This is what the Water Revolution Foundation is aiming at with the database of sustainable materials. Products that are sustainable from a life cycle point of view are verified and will be promoted in order to support informed decision-making towards more sustainable practices.”

From circular build materials used in a 10-metre racer to a colossal 141 metre wooden sailing yacht, companies at both ends of the yachting industry – and all the way in between – are developing extraordinary projects that show there is no barrier to what can be achieved when talented designers, engineers, suppliers and shipyards are given the impetus to innovate by forward-thinking, driven clients. And whether these new techniques and materials end up in cars, in wind turbine blades, or in other industries altogether, the results are sure to have a lasting impact far beyond yachting.