Re-use: from recycled materials to refurbished boats
End-of-life boats are reborn at the ReBoat yard. In French sailing hotspot Lorient a refurbishing yard collects older pleasure yachts to reform them into modern-day boats with the quality and finish of new. All around Europe, composite boats are collected for recycling of the raw materials. Circularity in the marine industry is starting to materialise.
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A brand new boat from the late nineteen-eighties is exhibited end of September this year at the ‘Grand Pavois’ boat show in La Rochelle, France. This Jeanneau Sun Magic 44, built in 1987, has been stripped down and completely refurbished by ReBoat. This company from sail racing hub Lorient in Brittany, France, makes yachts at the end of their lifespan as good as new. Re-use, circularity and reducing environmental footprint as caused by leisure boating, are the goals of the company. The Sun Magic is their most recent project. Since the launch of ReBoat in 2024, already eight sailing yachts, both monohulls and catamarans, have been refurbished in the hall of former shipyard France Nautisme.
Modern standards
A yacht good as new with a hull from a 40 or 30 year old design, but equipped with the latest instruments and a new interior built to today’s standards with modern equipment – this is something that may perfectly meet the requirements of cruising sailors and club racers. It could also be a good bargain: the price of such good-as-new yachts from ReBoat can be 30 up to 40 percent lower than a new yacht of comparable size. Co-founder of ReBoat, Dimitri Caudrelier (brother of Charles, the known ocean racing sailor) explained in the French magazine Voile & Moteur: “The marine industry depends on a fragile environment: the ocean. We recognise how crucial the ocean is for life on earth. The linear economy, in which raw materials are used once and then disposed to leave in nature, is just no longer an option. It makes no sense any more. Especially when you realise that yachts and leisure boats remain in the dock for the majority of the time, while they are being built to withstand the big forces and impact of sailing on big waves, it is just an enormous waste of the hull to demolish it.” The hulls of older boats, built in the 1980’s and 1990’s will still be very good. Stripped down to the basic construction, with inspection and if necessary renewal of keel and rudder constructions, a yacht can be rebuilt to 2020’s standards.
Charter market
Apart from individual boaters, ReBoat wants to target managing companies of fleets of rental boats. These companies need to update the fleets at a regular basis. A considerable reduction of material use can be achieved by refurbishing existing yachts instead of building new. To be able to set up a renewal production at the scale that would allow for the rapid servicing of larger rental fleets, the company is seeking for investors, a new and bigger production hall with skilled crew.
Materials of value
In Hamburg, Germany, a company with the same name follows a different approach to leisure boat recycling. The company ReBoat of founders Jens Mahnke and Mark Walberg started in the fall of 2024. They noticed the amount of abandoned boats in marinas, on the dry, in backyards and wastelands. The boats are abandoned in these places because there is nowhere to go with a boat after it’s lifetime. That is where the German ReBoat steps in. They take the boat apart to capture all of the usable parts and separate all of the recyclable materials. There is value in the materials. This makes the cost for demolishing and recycling a lot lower for the owners of an end-of-lifetime boat.
Stockpile
The founders estimate that some 300,000 boats across Europe are somewhere waiting to be picked up, demolished and recycled. “What at first manifests as an environmental problem, with polyester resin, glass fibre, oil in the engine and antifouling coating on the bottom, can also bee seen as a stockpile of materials that can be harvested for re-use,” the boat recycling duo reasons.
Profit share
The Hamburg ReBoat company lets the owners who contribute their boat for recycling benefit from the value of the materials they bring in. A fair share of the value is presented to the donators. In some cases, where the cost of demolishing the boat can be kept low and the volume of recyclable material is high, the owners that supply their end-of-life boat may even earn money. In all other cases, the cost of dismantling and recycling is reduced by the share in the value of materials. This method will increase the acceptance of recycling in the leisure boat industry, the company founders argue.
