Green Materials

[sam shepherd]

ok,

so all materials we use for boat building are obviously bad, but unfortunately they will still be built, so what do we think is the best option for building a luxury superyacht.

thanks everyone.

[rasorinc]

If It Is To Be Green--------it Is Wood, Wood, Wood, Wood.........Old Ironside is over 225 years old. White oak clad in pig iron
a perfect recipe for fast Rot. She still floats in Boston Harbor.

[PAR]

Actually The USS Constitution (only 212 years old) is built from live oak, which is in the white oak family, but a much more dense and tougher material then regular whites, because of it's interlocking grain and specific gravity.

Efforts could be made to green up mega yachts, though I don't see an incentive for them to do so currently. It's all about legislation and availability. If you don't have to, because you're not required to, then it generally doesn't get done. If green products are more readily available then conventional materials (or more cost effective), then these will get used.

So long as special interests, conservative political action influences and big industry essentially run our governments, then you can rest assured the status quo will remain for as long as possible. They're not going to willingly knock over their own apple carts, they'll have to be forced.

Why do you think no major push has been made by all automotive manufactures to get more environmentally friendly cars out there? They've done 20 year projections and damn well have known what's coming, but the market isn't there yet, so why bother. The same is true of all the "new alternative energy" industries. Solar has been telling the world, "the next big break through in battery technology will do it" for the last 40 years. The funds aren't being supplied, because the oil and related industries are either buying controlling interests and breaking them up or through the use of politician pressure, insuring they don't get federal help. Wind power is rising, but it too has to butt heads with the well entrenched petrol based industries and is having the same difficulties. In fact all the new "green" industries are up against a wall of corporate greed and old school politicians who know where their re-election funds are coming from.

See, most don't realize what actually comes out of a barrel of crude. Yep, gas, diesel, aviation fuel, etc., right? Wrong. All plastics, including our precious epoxy, the vast majority of cosmetics, huge hunks of medical equipment and supplies, including medications, all man made fabrics. The list is massive folks.

We are so entrenched in petrol chemicals, that it will take nearly world wide collapse to instill change. I was hoping this latest "adjustment" (price spikes this past summer) would be the jump start needed, but it was an unsustainable attempt by OPEC.

Now in 5 years, when the oil production hump is clearly passed and China and India's consuming needs rise at predicted rates, then the hand writing will be on the wall and change will begin (slowly). By then the petrol industries, which will have been heavily divested into these green industries, will call in their "markers" on their hedged bets, made in the last couple of decades and they'll remain in control of the energy supplies of the world, which is the whole point of their existence. They'll still have the political might, the purse strings and the sources of supply.

Why do you think the oil man T. Boon Pickens is all hopped up about going natural gas? Maybe he's seen the future in a vision? He's talking about our dependence on foreran oil (which he's heavily invested in by the way) right? Wrong. He's one of the counties largest producers of natural gas and sitting on a gold mine if he can get it shoved down our throats. He doesn't care about our oil dependence. He does care that his reserves are running dry and would really like to sell his huge stock piles of natural gas though. It's a simple business decision for him, not as he'd have you believe and a moral issue.

[Boston]

simple way to look at green building materials is by observing the embodied energy of each material considered

plank on frame, steam bent, bronze fastened uses no epoxies, little metal and most likely has the lowest footprint

I would think composite or aluminum construction would have the highest embodied energy and so the largest footprint

good luck and great question
B

[PAR]

I would think the largest footprint would be a 'glass hull. It's entirely made from petrol chemicals.

[Boston]

fiber glass reenforsing mats are about 55
epoxy is about 125
I think the ratio is suposed to be 60% mat and 40% resin

aluminum is about 230

wood kiln dried about 0.5

[peter radclyffe]

Originally Posted by sam shepherd

Hello everybody,

I was hoping to open a discussion on green boat building materials and green techniques of building. What are the least damaging materials to the environment to use for large vessels (say over 40-50m), and are there any techniques for building that are environmentally friendy. Does going green relate to a much more expensive product? Will it be economically viable in the near future? I am just trying to research the boat building industries carbon footprint and would love to hear some experienced opinions.

Thanks

Sam

hello, pine ,larch, a lot of the big wartime wooden boats, they lasted well were strong & the timber was/ is often closer to the yard, & quick to grow & less toxic to work, like a lot of industries, the super yacht one will not adapt to new materials because their all in bed with each others support ,their afraid to change, really what % of a modern yacht is green? almost none of it ,as so many firms are going bust this may be a good time for you to educate them to new less selfish ways

[kerosene]

"Bauxite is strip mined (surface mining) because it is found at the surface, with little or no overburden. Approximately 95% of the world's bauxite production is processed into aluminium. Bauxites are typically classified according to their intended commercial application: metallurgical, abrasive, cement, chemical and refractory.

here's how. Bauxites are heated in pressure vessels with sodium hydroxide solution at 150-200 °C through which aluminium is dissolved as aluminate (Bayer process). After separation of ferruginous residue (red mud) by filtering, pure gibbsite is precipitated when the liquor is cooled and seeded with fine grained aluminium hydroxide. Gibbsite is converted into aluminium oxide by heating. This is molten at approx. 1000 °C by addition of cryolite as a flux and reduced to metallic aluminium by a highly energy-consumptive electrolytic process (the Hall-Héroult process). "

Creating aluminum is extremely energy intensive.

[Jimbo1490]

There's so much aluminum already refined that exists as 'scrap', that aluminum is actually not as energy intensive in the 'real world' because it recycles so easily. Recycling aluminum is not terribly energy intensive.

Jimbo

[Boston]

well this graph got butchered in the process but you can still clearly see that the even just a portion of the embodied energy of aluminum in its recycled form is about 190 times that of virgin wood which is listed in a previous post

190 times is a significant number
and remember this graph only deals with the btu's involved in one step of the process so the actual embodied energy is higher

think of it this way
it takes about 19 times more energy to smelt glass cullet than it does to re-manufacture aluminum

making recycled aluminum probably the most energy intensive re-manufacturing process other than maybe titanium

Energy required
to produce from
virgin material
(million Btu/ton)

Energy saved
by using
recycled materials
(percentage)

Aluminum
250

95

Plastics
98

88

Newsprint
29.8

34

Corrugated Cardboard
26.5

24

Glass
15.6

5

[Jimbo1490]

Boston,

Try to reformat that, it seems all the data got

dis

com

bob
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Jimbo

[Boston]

working on it
thanks for the tip

sorry that data wont come up in the form it is originally
basically if you read the top number from directly under the material its the btu in millions per ton from virgin ore
the second number is from recycled material

so aluminum is 250 million btu per ton new
and 95 million btu per ton recycled

pretty much the highest of em all
at least on that list

[rasorinc]

Wood..............................We have many,many, many tree farms. It is the Greenest material. And if cared for, lasts the longest.

[Boston]

ya the embodied energy of wood all types except teak is something like 0.5
hands down the most enviromentally friendly thing to build out of
now if we can just come up with some good old fashioned glue instead of all the chemically heinous stuff like epoxy and the formaldehyde based glues

[peter radclyffe]

Originally Posted by Boston

ya the embodied energy of wood all types except teak is something like 0.5
hands down the most enviromentally friendly thing to build out of
now if we can just come up with some good old fashioned glue instead of all the chemically heinous stuff like epoxy and the formaldehyde based glues

did your ancestors arrive in a boat built without glue, we dont need glue