RS Sailing – Sustainability Programme

by RS Sailing on 9 Mar 2017 The core team at RS Sailing are life-long sailors who love being on the water. We’d like to think we’ve developed some great boats for people like us and for the next generation of sailors, so we want to do our part to focus on protecting the environment we all enjoy sailing in.

With that in mind RS Sailing is implementing a Sustainability Programme – analysing, improving and publicising, where helpful, relevant aspects of our boats and operations.

For example a high percentage of RS hulls are made from the highest grade rotomoulded polyethylene – a material which is 100% recyclable, a fact that has been little known and, therefore, under-used.

Most RS spars and many foils are made from aluminium alloy – again fully recyclable. We have set up a recycling collection service at RS HQ in the UK and are happy to extend this facility to other classes – if you have a broken spar you’re welcome to drop it to RS for recycling.

RS cardboard packaging is good stuff – produced entirely from 100% managed woodland materials with a high percentage of recycled content and 100% recyclable.

We’re changing our polythene boat wrapping to a material that is bio based – made from 50% sugar cane waste, officially re-classified as paper and totally recyclable.

Within our operations, among other things we’re implementing energy supply from clean sources, improving our own waste recycling, adopting a “practically paperless” office approach, using recycled products where possible and reducing internal transport before freight to our international customers.

RS Sailing has benefitted from inspirational and knowledgeable input to our sustainability project from a number of experts and we’re planning to work alongside the technical team at World Sailing on the evaluation of more environmentally friendly FRP composite construction materials. We will work with our enthusiastic international RS dealers to extend best-practice and information worldwide.

At RS Sailing we see this as an ongoing programme – the job will never be done. We aim to continually improve and to set the sustainability standard within our part of the sailing industry which we hope others will follow.