Meet the sailor/environmentalist trying to mainstream sustainable composites for boatbuilding

In April, the Australian Composites CRC announced a collaborative project with partners Lisa Blair, Steber International, University of NSW Sydney and SOENECS, tackling the problem of fibreglass waste from end-of-life boats. Ahead of her keynote address at ACM CRC’s Partner Meeting on August 19, Blair shares a little about her sailing adventures and the project, titled Sustainable Composites for Next Gen Boat Hulls.      

ACM CRC: How would you describe your story as an adventurer so far? 

LB: I was late to adventuring and started sailing at the age of 25. After sailing through a sea of plastic, I decided I would use extreme sailing and world records to create advocacy and change.

So far I've sailed around Antarctica twice, around Australia, around New Zealand and around the world in a whole bunch of different projects. And I've managed to basically deliver on my goal of creating climate advocacy with the Climate Action Now campaign and the citizen science work I do.

ACM CRC: So what is the situation with fibreglass waste in boats and why is it so? 

LB: It's an untold story of the boating industry. We currently have 35 to 40 million fibreglass boats reaching their end of life and no disposal strategy in place.

Landfills are filling up, but also it's so cost prohibitive for the average boat owner to dispose of their vessel. Keep in mind that the person throwing away their boat is the last person to own it. So they've likely bought a really cheap, run-down vessel.

And so they're getting dumped and abandoned in the ocean. And a fibreglass boat is effectively fibreglass and liquid plastic, which is epoxy. So as they break down at sea, they're adding microplastics and environmental pollutants to the ocean.

And we're seeing this on a larger and larger scale, consistently. France estimates 100,000 boats in France are sunk or abandoned every single year. And the global estimate is one to two per cent of that 35 to 40 million are dumped at sea.

So it's a significant growing pollution issue. And it has now been proven to enter the food stream through oysters. So it needs addressing. 

ACM CRC: And how do composites fit into your story as an adventurer? 

LB: So my current boat, Climate Action Now, that I've done all my records with to date is a fibreglass vessel. I didn't know about this problem when I purchased that boat, and there weren't alternative solutions available to me at the time. 

The way we build boats has considerably changed as well. So as an explorer and an adventurer, I'm using these materials in my trips. And you would see it also with polar exploration, with sleds that people are taking. And we're creating this pollution pathway unintentionally.

We love sailing and we love exploration because we love nature and being in nature and testing ourselves against that. And today with modern composites, there are alternatives. So unfortunately, there's not enough research and data at this stage for those alternatives to be mainstream.

My goal is to work with you guys and everyone else on how we can bridge the gap for innovation and change and ensure that the whole industry is uplifted and transitioned. 

ACM CRC: So, basalt fibre reinforced composites. How did that come up as an answer for you? 

LB: I first became aware of basalt fibre in marine applications about six or seven years ago. And I started following Norbert Sedlacek Koch, an Austrian explorer and the founder/CEO of Innovation yachts, who was building a boat in France.

And they were building a 60-foot boat to go around the Arctic and around Antarctica through the Northwest Passage around the Americas and Antarctica. And they were building it out of this new material, basalt.

And I hadn't really heard about it. And so I did some digging. And I was already aware of the pollution issue at that stage. Not necessarily the scale of severity, but I was aware that there was an impact there. 

And so I started looking and researching. And I realised that this is an amazing material. It's been around for over 50 years. Historically, it's been capped in its application because it's been often mined from Ukraine or Russia, so war-torn, hard-to-access areas. And now with mines diversifying, they're actually diversifying to materials like basalt.

So we're getting a much bigger pool of basalt accessible to us. And it's being picked up and applied across a range of industries. I then learnt that they're replacing steel rebars and cement with basalt fibre rebars, which has been going on for over a decade.

I learnt that there were other boat manufacturing companies starting to build with basalt. And I started then seeing, about two years ago, basalt fibre surfboards hitting the market. 

It is an amazing material, but a lot of these production and material uses were using basalt in combination with epoxy, which didn't solve the environmental issue. Basalt's much more sustainable to harvest versus other fibres, as well as fully recyclable, so we can repurpose it again and again and again. You just melt it down and re-extrude it into new strands. 

But if we're pairing it up with plastic still — epoxy — unfortunately we're not solving that environmental issue with our oceans. For me, it was really important to try and see where the solution lies and where technology exists today with combinations of current bioresins and basalt fibres, and to see if there's a solution that can become mainstream, that can be scaled up. 

And so that is a lot of the research we're doing at the moment. So we're looking at all the bioresins around the world. And we're stripping them back based on their characteristics, their mechanical properties, and their circularity and scalability potential. And we're trying to work out what is the ultimate solution. And then we're going to be open sourcing that research to the world.

ACM CRC’s annual Partner Meeting will be held on August 19 and 20 at Level 3, Salesforce Tower, Sydney. Lisa Blair’s keynote will open day one at this invite-only event. You can read more about Lisa Blair at her website, Lisa Blair Sails the World, and more about the Partner Meeting here.