Turning old boats into new solutions

Old boats are a dime a dozen in New England, observes Tyson Bottenus ’09, former sustainability director at Sailors for the Sea, a Newport-based organization that unites boaters to protect the ocean.

After a few years off the market, a used boat’s value drops precipitously and eventually it ends up under a tarp in someone’s backyard or at the back of a boatyard, Bottenus writes in a story posted on the organization’s website at sailorsforthesea.org. Many make their way to the landfill. But the path there is expensive and time consuming: It’s estimated that it would cost $20 million to dispose of the estimated 1,500 abandoned or derelict boats in Florida alone. In Rhode Island, the smallest state—with an almost-full landfill—the question of what to do with derelict fiberglass boats is pressing.

“It’s not like you can recycle fiberglass like you can recycle a plastic bottle,” Evan Ridley ’15, a research assistant at Rhode Island Sea Grant, tells Bottenus. But while a fiberglass boat can’t be recycled in the traditional sense, Ridley says there are other options.

“The global demand for fiberglass is going up and production is going up,” Ridley adds. “To be throwing fiberglass away is counterintuitive.”

Ridley’s research reveals that in Europe, “fiberglass has been adopted as this wonder material by the European cement industry.” Now, he tells Bottenus, he’s figuring out the logistics of how to supply the cement industry with fiberglass from derelict boats.

“The great thing that we’re doing at Sea Grant, since it’s a national program, is that if we can get a strategic plan written for developing a pilot program in Rhode Island, we could then share that with all the other Sea Grant programs in the network; all thirty-three states that no doubt have these same issues, but have better access to cement markets than the East Coast,” he says. “It’s potentially a national solution.” •