Looks like the environmentally conscious among us can breath a little more happily while sailing our exotic craft,... soon?

Not saying it's not still a good idea to reduce our impact but at least we don't go and burn 100-200kg of refined petroleum fuel every other weekend on top of all that carbon fibre stuff........

Ooo... that's interesting. Thanks for sharing.

 I think anything that can be done to reduce impact is a good idea. And I'm totally with Jim on the waste involved in boat production. I have a massive crisis when I'm chucking away a tone of Peel Ply or Breather Bag or whatever. 

One more argument for lightweight dinghies made from wood! ( couldn't help but bring it back the 3.7! ;-) ) But then the wood needs to be responsibly sourced!

In my view there's defiantly a market for someone to provide a single point of purchase for responsibly sourced timber and eco boat building materials.

https://www.britishpathe.com/video/firefly-racing-dinghy

In my view there's defiantly a market for someone to provide a single point of purchase for responsibly sourced timber and eco boat building materials.

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It's not a new idea (Dave Rose has been building world beating OKs this way for decades), but a ply/foam/ply sandwich can build a very stiff structure and I guess an opportunity to use thinner skins to get weight down without sacrificing performance or keep them thicker and have a long competitive life.

Of course we wont mention the processing and glue needed to make ply in the first place....

First time I've seen that even mentioned as a selling point for a small racing boat, let alone be  a key selling point which warrants it's own advertising material. 

Slightly different thread needed for this but. For a Class to be successful, i.e grow in size and improve the competitive element of the class, they NEED boat churn. Because the majority of owners do actually own a old, older, really old boat. But to grow you need new boats coming in at the top.

You could leverage your argument at the over servicing of the saturated dinghy sailing market. We have to many Classes that do the same thing. But all objects that race - cars, planes, bikes and sail boats wear out and need replacing. Because winning is about small percentages. Finding the most eco way of doing this is surly a very important thing.

Rigs and sails can be easily updated and replaced

These people are extracting sugars  from the cellulose within the crop waste.  Often called cellulosic sugars.  Sugar is a carbon source and can be used to make a wide variety of bio-chemical products. Carbon fibre is new to me but certainly organic resins and other high value products are possible.

Extracting the sugar is an enzyme based process and ain't a bus ride away from how herbivores also convert cellulose in plants to sugars for their very existence.

My company works with a US outfit who make cellulosic sugars but in their case,  the cellulose source comes from household garbage by way of its high proportion of food, card and paper waste.  

One could, in theory make a high-tech boat from rubbish.  A rubbish boat, if you like.  

I love the idea of that.

In terms of the game that we like to play would the racing be of any less quality if we sailed such craft? You could weigh them and use a Lamboley test to check the weight distribution. Yes you would have to do it every year but not impossible.