What is Sail Exchange? How does its business fit into the sail recycling landscape?
Sail Exchange, an Australian-based online retail platform, offers sailors the opportunity to sell surplus sail materials, yachting hardware, electronics, rigging, spars, and safety equipment. By providing a cost-effective option for sailors to acquire sail materials, Sail Exchange not only helps reduce the environmental impact of the sailing industry but also ensures that sail materials are reused rather than disposed of prematurely. The company also repurposes sail material that is no longer suitable for sailing.
Currently, Sail Exchange facilitates the resale of various sail materials such as Spinnaker Nylon, Spinnaker Laminate, Dacron, Spinnaker Membrane-Code Zero, Headsail-Mainsail Laminate-TR, Membrane, and North 3DI. These are made with a range of synthetic products such as Carbon, Aramid, Mylar, Nylon, Polyester, Vectran and Dyneema.
At Sail Exchange sails are taken on consignment with the profit shared between Sail
Exchange and the consignor. This is an equitable arrangement and provides
transparency which is an important part of our environmental, social and governance
(ESG) commitment. The consignor has the benefit of a sophisticated platform to sell
the sail where otherwise finding a potential buyer would be extremely difficult.
Currently Sail Exchange has an annual turnover of approximately 600 units, at an
average weight of 20kg per sail this means that we are preventing somewhere in the
realm of 12 tonnes of sail cloth from entering landfill each year.
While most of our consignors drop off their used sails at our Sydney warehouse, we also receive significant shipments of surplus sails from sailmakers across Australia and globally. It's worth noting the significant logistical challenges involved in transporting these heavy and bulky sails to a central hub for resale and distribution, which can be both difficult and costly. Without a centralised location with consistent access to a supply of used sails, the business of selling them wouldn't be as economically viable.
Sail Exchange's success can be attributed to the user-friendly online presentation of used sails. Each sail is categorised by size and graded on a scale of 1-10, with 10/10 representing sails in perfect condition and lower grades suitable for repurposing. It's important to note that selling technical items like sails requires specific expertise. Without this knowledge, managing a sail reselling centre could pose organisational challenges.
When it comes to the operational challenges of reselling sails, one key aspect is figuring out what to do with sails that are no longer suitable for sailing. At Sail Exchange, our goal is to promote the reuse and recycling of sails and yachting equipment to reduce landfill waste and lessen our carbon footprint. We have seen great success in repurposing sails for various other industries. These sails, unfit for sailing, have found new life in architectural interior design, as decorative covers for outdoor use, in the creation of personal accessories like bags, as materials for artists' projects, and even as components for toy kites.
Some sails may be too damaged, torn, dirty, or delaminated to be resold. Sail Exchange is actively collaborating with academic and industry partners to explore ways to recycle sail materials. The potential for recycling non-composite sail cloth like Dacron and Nylon, for repurposing as raw materials, is currently being researched through methods such as extrusion and pelletising trials. Additionally, efforts are underway to investigate the recycling of composite sail materials, such as laminates and membranes, in partnership with academic research organisations like Sustainable Sailing in the UK. This commitment to recycling research aims to establish a future possibility of establishing a central hub for directing unusable sails to recycling facilities.