THE governing body for sailing is looking at how the sport’s Olympic-class equipment is made, used and discarded, to eventually make changes that will reduce its environmental impact.

Director of sustainability at World Sailing Alexandra Rickham said this first-of-a-kind life cycle assessment project will give the organisation the evidence it needs to make smarter choices and shape the future of Olympic equipment.

“Sailing naturally has a close relationship with nature, with the environment. It’s seen very much as this clean, green sport using the wind,” she said. “But the reality is that our equipment has an impact. It goes through some major industrial processes.”

Rickham said the project could be useful not just for Olympic sailing but for the broader sailing community and potentially other sports.

Competitive sailing, an Olympic sport since 1900, involves racing boats powered by only the wind and the waves. In the 2024 Olympics, one and two-person crews sailed boats with hulls measuring as long as 17 feet (five metres) around a course marked by buoys in the Bay of Marseille.

Outside of the Olympics, competitive sailors race throughout the year in local events and larger regattas.

The boats are commonly made of carbon fibre, fibreglass and PVC foam, which take a lot of energy to produce in processes that emit carbon pollution. These materials don’t decompose and are challenging to recycle. So when elite sailors are done with them, the boats would need to be sold, passed on to junior sailors or sent for specialised recycling to avoid landfills.

As part of World Sailing’s initiative, the sustainability consultancy Marine Futures is collecting data from boat builders about their operations and surveying athletes about how many boats, sails, masts and other gear they use, how often they replace their equipment and how they travel with their vessels.

By the end of this year, the goal is to capture the environmental impact of a four-year Olympic cycle and identify which interventions by World Sailing could make the most difference, said Ollie Taylor, director of Marine Futures. Taylor said those could include encouraging builders to incorporate reusable materials, redesigning boats, shifting competition schedules to minimise travel and boat transport or taking steps to ensure equipment is reused.

The goal is to remove guesswork and put data behind every decision, Taylor said.

Michelle Carnevale, president of the environmental organisation 11th Hour Racing, said the effort shows how much progress has been made in recent years. Sustainability wasn’t talked about much in the sailing world a decade ago, and now environmental monitoring and benchmarking could become embedded into the rules of the sport.

Walker Ross, an expert on sport ecology and sustainability at the University of Edinburgh, said he loves World Sailing’s leadership on sustainability and wishes more sports organisations were as thoughtful.

“Many sports have specialised equipment that can be quite resource-intensive to produce and which are therefore difficult to recycle at the end of their useful lives,” he wrote in an email on Wednesday.

Stuart Parkinson, executive director of Scientists for Global Responsibility, commended World Sailing for tackling the environmental impacts of boat construction. 

But Parkinson, whose organisation calculates the environmental impact of major sporting events, said the biggest impacts of international sports come from travel, especially air travel by spectators.

Sailors want to be better stewards of the environment

At the Olympic level, sailors often buy equipment in multiples to pick out the best one in the hopes of gaining a competitive edge. That can add up to more waste, said Olympian Dave Hughes, who competed and coached for the US team.

“There is a certain amount of competition to always have the best equipment and that can create a variety of opportunities for places where we can save on waste,” said Hughes, chair of the committee representing athletes at World Sailing.

Hughes said that if World Sailing can work with manufacturers to create higher standards, there would be less variation and less incentive to source multiple options for a given piece of equipment such as masts, foils or sails. That would help the environment and lower teams’ costs, said Hughes.

“Our connection to the ocean environment is daily, so therefore our experience of how the planet is changing is also daily,” Hughes said.

Santiago Sampaio, chief technical officer of the International Laser Class Association, which oversees a type of single-handed racing dinghy used in the Olympics, said he thinks it is possible to reduce the amount of equipment used by sailors annually and to use building materials that don’t harm the environment. The association is testing whether high-density PVC foam on the ILCA sailboat could be replaced with environmentally friendly recycled PET plastic.

Sampaio said it will be important to consider whether any change would impact a boat’s performance or longevity, render thousands of other boats already in use obsolete, or make it unaffordable for some teams to compete.

“We don’t want to make a boat that is too expensive. It’s great for the environment, but then we don’t have people in Fiji or in Ghana or Angola that can actually buy this environmentally sustainable boat, and then we lose those people.”

World Sailing hopes to inspire broader changes

Rickham said that ideally any changes or new regulations based on the project’s findings will be in place for the 2032 Olympics, if not earlier. The data could be used for selecting some equipment suppliers for the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles. Starting in 2032, Olympic sailing classes will be required to provide an independently verified life-cycle assessment.

Rickham said World Sailing hopes the wider sailing community and other sports organisations will follow its lead.

“That’s where our biggest area of impact is: the ripple effect that we can drive across Olympic sports and the industry of boating and recreational boating going forward,” she said.

Madeleine Orr, assistant professor of sport ecology at the University of Toronto, thinks that could happen. World Sailing will have the data needed to push its suppliers to adopt more sustainable materials and circular options, and those suppliers’ other clients span the whole boating sector, Orr said.