recycling composite boat

Hi!!

I would like to study for my thesis the way to recycle boats..
In italy is a very important problem..

Anyone of you have material to give me?

Thanks

 

Chevrolet has been building Corvette bodies from recycled fiberglass materials for many years. That might be a place to begin your research.

 

Resin melts at a low temp. I guess you could cook the hull and melt the resin out and harvest the fibers.

perhaps throw the hull into a huge TREE SHREADER.... Grind it to powder, bag it up....melt off the resin ..then take the left over fibers and add to concrete to make reinforced concrete ?

...sounds like the whole disposal process will be energy intensive. Perhaps first build a very powerful solar reflector, concentrator. Trailer the dead Bavaria to the solar collector oven and melt it ?

Or perhaps build a mobile solar oven, ray gun.... BIG ONE...trailer it to the marina...the marina staff points out the dead boats, the non bill payers...you aim your solar ray gun at the Bavaria and Poof !!! it turns into a smolder pile of fibers ready to haul away ?

Might be a fun retirement job to be the guy manning the controls of the solar ray gun

 

You are posting the same thread more than once. It makes it confusing to answer.

 

yes sorry..

I'm new and I don't know where to post this kind of thread..

Which country is famous in recycling boats?? Where do I'd go to study a solution for this problem??

sorry for my english..

 

Yachts of most materials are commonly burned as fuel, which can do one of several tasks. This isn't an especially big social concern, unless hurricanes or other natural "events" pile a bunch up against the local sea walls. Even in these instances this isn't a particularly difficult or uncommon thing to have preformed. After Katrina thousands of yachts have been ground up and used as industrial fuel.

My point is, there's no solution to look for, as there isn't a problem with a boat population that's out of control. Small craft get dragged to the land fill, larger craft are cut up, then carted off to the land fill. This raw material is then tossed in a furnace where typically the energy is converted to steam, which is converted to rotational force (usually) which is then put to work. Metal yachts are often just salvaged for their metals, so again where is the "problem needing a solution"?

 

When I parked the motorhome in San Guiliano near Venice your problem was evident; the whole coastline was littered with derelict speedboats and runabouts, lots of them still with outboards or sterndrives.

I solve the problem in our bay by towing unregistered boats to an open space, pour some diesel over them and set them on fire. The remaining glass fiber goes in the dumpster.
In some countries I would probably end up behind bars....

 

Hi Lucazt,

I wrote about boat recycling for Professional Boatbuilder back in 1999. You can download a copy of the article from my website here:

http://sponbergyachtdesign.com/Articles.htm

Scroll down to "Recycling Dead Boats" and the other article there, "Decommissioning of End of Life Boats." You (and everyone) can download these articles from this link. The first is the article I wrote, and it gives an overview of the problem at that time--which has not changed too much since then, although there have been new technological advances. It covers the situation primarily in the US. The second article covers more recent developments in Europe.

The technology of recycling faces basically three big problems, all of which are solvable. The first is--how do you identify, capture, transport, and collect all the dead boats in a central location for processing? In the US, even here in my own community, we have a lot of derelict boats, but boats are registered properties like cars. Recycling authorities have to establish clear ownership of the boat before they can take it. It can be done, but it takes time--here about 90-120 days. Many boats are stuck in inaccessible locations such as riverbeds and swamps, and you need special equipment to lift them out and get them to the shore. This can be done, but you need committed people and governments and money to make it happen.

The second problem is there are few processing plants available to recycle boats, and the processes required are varied. Once they leave the factory, boats are considered "dirty"--that is, they are mixed up with lots of other materials such as wood, fabric, a wide variety of metals, plus contaminating liquids like oil, diesel and gasoline fuels, and just plain grime and mud. All these things have to be separated out and recycled themselves in different ways. The processing plant has to be able to make these separations. At the time I wrote my article, there were over 1,400 car recyclers in the US, but there was just one boat recycler. The infrastructure to collect and process the dead boats is just not there. Even today, most dead boats in the US go to landfills.

The third problem is, when you process the boats, what are you going to do with the recyclable materials? What materials do you get out of them, and what are you going to do with them? Fiberglass boats do not have much useable energy or useable material built into their hulls and decks, so the amount of fuel enegy you get out of them is limited, and it is expensive to capture that energy. You can't burn them, but you can pyrolyze them--burn them in the absence of oxygen to extract some useable energy and useable ash. One of the biggest processing problems is that boat composites are made up of woven and knitted glass fabrics, and when you try to grind them up into small bits, these fabrics ball up into "cotton balls" that are totally useless. A Canadian company has apparently solved this problem, so there might be hope.

So, there are many technological and infrastructure type challenges that have to be overcome. But I am seeing increased activity and interest from people all around the world to solve these problems. I maintain a contact list of people who write to me so that they may communicate with each other to mutual benefit, share information, new developments, and success stories. Anyone may write to me for that contact and to be added to that list and request a copy.

I hope that helps. Good luck on your thesis.

Eric

 

More info. As you study also contact your GREEN Parliamentarian in Brussels, get them thinking and FORCE mandatory marine industry composite recycling. Harbour are bulging with dead boats..


http://www.ericgreeneassociates.com/images/Recycling_Composite_Boats.pdf

 

Volvo Penta is the only marine related company I know of that recycles almost 100%. They will even take back used parts and recycle them. I think VP would be a good source of information.

 

Fiberglass burns quite readily,the trick is to keep it from burning sometimes,like Par said burn in a boiler and convert to electric power.

 

The whole problem is that there is not a lot of gain in recycling boats. You can perhaps reclaim some energy, but you need to consume a lot of energy (transport, labour). So efficiency will always be negative.

This means you will either need law or subsidy to perform this task.

I do know of companies that grind up off-cuts of their products, and use the powder as a filler for casting polyester products. But these offcuts are relatively clean. Even then buying commercially available fillers (talcum, etc) is sometimes cheaper.

 

Hey, CDK, I probably would get in trouble, too but a technique I use is to make sure it's oil and chemical free and make a fish house out of it. The octopodes and such can never have too many places to call home.

 

Plenty to gain if legislators approach the problem. It would be very easy to add a recycling tax to each boats yearly registration fee. Wood, metal, plastic...all vessels.

When the vessel reaches the end of its service cycle, a company like yours could come in and professionally breakup, recycle, dispose of the hull and be correctly reimbursed from the disposal fund generated by the yearly registration tax. If your company goes into the boat breakers business..you will find ways to profit from the residue of the process.

Its unacceptable that these plastic products clutter the waterfront. The small shipyard in my neighborhood has a big percentage of its hard standing space cluttered with plastic shipwrecks. Some of these vessels are 25 meters long. When the court orders destruction the shipyard ends up footing the bill so they take the cheap and dirty route...chainsaw them into bread slices then steamroll them into an IKEA flat pack bundles and dispose in a public landfill.

It may be a pleasure to watch a Bavaria being flat packed, but it is wasteful and unacceptable to plug public landfills . .

Remember...yachts in the Mediterranean reach the end of their service cycle long before the vessels systems fail. The Mediterranean Geography dictates man made ports and limits marina growth. This pressure for space makes the yearly Dockage fees so high that many marinas are packed with boats who are behind paying dockage fees well in excess of the yachts market resale value. The high season dockage in this marina is 6.5 EURO per square meter per night. That is correct...per night.

At present there are 7 "over the hill" plastic yachts anchored in an exposed bay outside the port because they cant pay dockage. These boats are a public nuisance and inevitably wash ashore in the first heavy southerly gale then create a public funded pollution, ,disposal mess.

 

I do like the idea Mark and will gently put it to the village council so they think it is their idea (otherwise they reject it). What we have here are mainly small boats, left by tourists. There also is a shallow lagoon nearby that we could turn into an octopus playground.

rgds,
Cornelis