One of the first steps to our national program of sail recycling took some shape recently. I was with the wonderful Chris from CL Shredders, Andover. Now, there isn’t much this guy doesn’t know about shredders and it was a pleasure to meet him.
Shredding is big in all senses of the word and some of the shredding machines he had were huge, tonka style machines. This was a boys toys playground!
Anyway, our sails sailed (sorry) through without too much bother and I now have four large bags of fluffy sail waste (see below).
We tried a really old sail in the tyre shredder – the ultimate shredding machine – but it didn’t like it much! Just goes to show the strength of some sails.
So now the question is how to use this waste? As some of you may have noted, we are trying some as insulation in the roof. We actually need a fair amount of shredded waste to make this an effective test. We are giving it a go nevertheless and it looks pretty good. I am writing a guest blog for another site about this so will link to that when I have finished.
Packaging. The guys at Eurovines are testing some of the nicer looking shredded sailcloth to use in presentation boxes with their wine. A novel idea and hopefully one that will work. We have already learnt that for this element we will need to clean it first 
Other packaging ideas spring to mind and I am also discussing with bespoke mattress providers as they can use this for mattress stuffing.
We will also be using the same in a new range of Pet Beds we are currently developing (coming soon to the site). It will make for a very comfortable pet bed stuffing and will keep the cost down a little. Watch this space for a funky cushion as well, that may or may not work. R&D is a wonderful department.
We are learning all the time and hope to eventually have a process in place where a sail will never be dumped in landfill again. Keep watching.
