Where do old boats go to die? Guardian Article
- Thread starter siwhi
- Start date
Pete7
Well-known member
Guess who has been watching Country File on Sunday evenings 
Poignard
Well-known member
A possible answer to the housing shortage?
HissyFit
Active member
There was quite an extensive article on this subject in PBO not long back. I think it's a crying shame that the ethical recycling or disposal of old boats is only voluntary.
pvb
Well-known member
Frogmogman
Well-known member
France introduced a levy on new boats sold in France from 1st January 2019, as well as making a contribution from the annual DAFN (navigation tax) to pay for the recycling of old vessels.
A charity called APER (Association pour la Plaisance Eco-Résponsable) organises the destruction of said boats through a network of yards.
A charity called APER (Association pour la Plaisance Eco-Résponsable) organises the destruction of said boats through a network of yards.
Buck Turgidson
Well-known member
get the manufacturers to dispose of one old boat of similar size for each new one the sell. Problem will disappear right quick.
Bru
Well-known member
I doubt it. I suspect the number of new boats sold exceeds the number that need scrapping by a considerable margin
You could, i suppose, require all new boat buyers to trade in an old boat . That could be workable
prv
Well-known member
Heh. That's quite a clever idea. Can't really see it happening on the boatbuilder / government side of things, but if it did, on the consumer side it would work quite neatly.
Obviously nobody would be trading in their perfectly viable 10- or 20-year old yachts (people entering the process of buying new do not sail old wrecks in need of disposal). They'd be selling those, as now, and looking for the cheapest possible hull to trade in. Suddenly all the old wrecks cluttering up yards and creeks have value again, as the entry ticket to the new boat scheme. Finding a wreck to enable the transfer would probably end up as a service that dealers offered (buyers don't need to get their hands grubby locating or transporting the thing, they may not even see it), and/or specialist small businesses that sprang up to do it. Because nobody wants to buy a more expensive boat than necessary to trigger the scrappage rule, this clears out the field from the bottom (ie, "free if you take it away") up, leaving the genuine second-hand market in viable boats untouched.
The problem is that now the boatbuilders are having to fund the safe disposal of the "traded in" wrecks, and they probably can't absorb those costs.
Pete
armchairsailor
Active member
Is it correct that you can recycle crushed fibreglass into concrete? If so, I would have thought that there would be some usefulness in an old hull. Mind you, I'm no fan of concrete, since that's globally one of the largest greenhouse gas emitting industries.
pvb
Well-known member
Yes, it can be done.
Bru
Well-known member
JumbleDuck
Well-known member
Sink them at Studland to make a habitat for sea horses.
HinewaisMan
Active member
This is quite an interesting page from a website.
https://www.boatbreakers.com/boatbreakers-scrapheap-challenges/
One of the few boat disposal companies it seems.
https://www.boatbreakers.com/boatbreakers-scrapheap-challenges/
One of the few boat disposal companies it seems.
D
Deleted member 36384
Guest
The video section is interesting; sounds like breaking egg shells.
I read an article about GRP when researching hydrolysis / osmosis in old boats. The article basically stated that eventually the resins break down into their constituents parts because they are not stable compounds but it may take a couple of hundred years. Not sure of the providence of that claim as it was not a technical paper.
JumbleDuck
Well-known member
As far as I am aware, the first production GRP gliders (Bölkow Phönix) from 1961 are still deemed airworthy, so the material looks as if it's good for at least 60 years.
siwhi
Active member
Like the 'war' on litter, fly tipping and dumping, the current social and cultural behavioral trend is to find it increasingly acceptable to leave someone else to deal with your waste, even though there is of course legislation in place designed to prevent dumping, both via bylaws and the Environmental Protection Act 1990. Often the reasons given for not disposing of things properly are the cost, difficulty or lack of facilities. Unless the waste can be given economic value, (for example a plastic bottle return scheme, or being valuable in another process such as concrete production), it will continue to be dumped, increasingly impacting our quality of life. It is past time to act, and I think reluctantly the government must get involved. For boats, a scrappage scheme may not be a crazy idea; or shipping them to Bangladesh for use as housing; or paying concrete companies to take them; or some simply leaving them in a designated graveyard until we have a good use for them or it becomes economically viable to recycle them. Facebook sites like 'sitting there rotting in a boatyard' 'boatscrapyard' and 'boatbreakers' give an indication of the scale of the problem, and also some of the answers, but much more is needed. IMO the solution needs to be holistic (the problem is not just boats, it's nation wide and has a socio-cultural dimension to it) and address the cost, difficulty and lack of facilities involved in getting rid of unwanted waste.
st599
Well-known member
I think something like the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment law will be required to force this through with policing to ensure that unscrupulous firms don't just ship waste boats off to the 3rd world to rot there.
Sniper
Member
How about another, more draconian, approach to the issue (which doesn’t immediately address the problem of historical disposal but caps the problem for the future) - ban all future hull and deck construction in non-recyclable materials. If you stop the use of GRP in its various non-recyclable forms the problem goes away in the future. New boats will become significantly more expensive, of course, but legacy hulls will gain value.
anyone want to buy a future-proofed wooden boat?
anyone want to buy a future-proofed wooden boat?
