40 Professional BoatBuilder

thrown away.” The truth is, if the sail-boat could be sold, it wouldn’t be here.

One hundred euros is also roughly the price of another boat in the yard. However, that money was paid to van der Pijll, owner of Bootdump—a boat-dismantling facility in the Dutch port city of Enkhuizen on the north-west coast of the IJsselmeer lake—in the same way you pay the dump for taking your garbage. It’s not a bad boat either. The 6.5m (21' ) Randmeer is a popular production-built open daysailer and one-design class by the well-known Dutch designer E.G. van de Stadt. This one, lying on its side in the open lot, was built between 1972 and 1974, he estimates, and has a

A boat at the end of its life is not necessarily an unseaworthy boat. “You can put it in the

water and sail away with it, but nobody wants to buy it,” says Bram van der Pijll, while we look over the yard behind his shop to a small yel-low sailboat tucked under a blue tarp on a rainy afternoon in November. “I hardly can sell a boat anymore. At the moment, there are too many private owners [with boats for sale].”

But if he did find a buyer, how much would he charge for it? He answers at first with a loud laugh. “One hundred euros,” he says. “If I was 16, I would have been very happy with a boat like this, and now it’s

In The Netherlands a former boat restorer takes on the growing problem of unwanted boats, one piece at a time.

Text and photographs by Melissa Wood

Above—Bootdump owner Bram van der Pijll sells reusable parts—such as the

outboard bracket he’s holding— to extract as much value as he can

from the boats he dismantles.

Boat Breaker

aPril/May 2016 41

water to work on restorations only, specializing in boats that mostly ranged from 15m to 35m (49' to 115' ).

One type of work again led to another. While he was restoring a 7.5m (24.6' ) sailboat that needed some spare parts, as luck would have it he found a sistership in even worse condition but with all the parts he wanted. When he went to the harbor to inquire about the parts, the boat’s owner had a different idea. “He said, ‘Well, if you take the whole boat, you can get the parts for free,’” says van der Pijll. “Then I had more parts than I needed. The keel I sold for scrap, and the rest I put in my shop. From one came another and then the next and the next one.”

As more people became aware of his surplus, more people came to him to buy parts. As restoration work dried up, dismantling work grew.

Modern Yacht Recycling’s Brief History

Two years before Bootdump’s hum-ble beginnings, in the summer of 2005 a small cargo ferry began visiting the scattered islands of Finland’s Turku archipelago. The ferry was there to take away unwanted boats at no charge. Boats accessible by land were picked up by truck, or they could be

Van der Pijll is originally from the south of Holland, where he once worked as a gardener, but a love of sailing led to work on old Dutch sail-ing barges, guiding tourists off the country’s north coast and England. He learned boat repair and restoration during the winter off-season, when the barges received seven-and-a-half months of maintenance.

“After 11 years, I changed my life a bit,” he says. This time he left the

decent, salvageable mast that, if sold in van der Pijll’s used equipment store, will help reduce the boat’s dis-posal cost.

Many parts can come off a boat and be put on another: masts, anchors, winches, and if you’re fortunate, a working engine. Boats that come to Bootdump—pronounced and mean-ing boat dump—have value only as the sum of their parts. More often, a boat’s balance sheet is greater on the expense side after you’ve added the costs of transporting it to the yard (which in extreme situations may also include the high cost of raising a sunken boat), dismantling with hand tools, and paying to dispose of any-thing that can’t be recycled, sold as scrap, or harvested for parts to restore still-living boats.

A boat is a balance sheet of profits and losses, depending on the value— or lack of value—of its parts. In the yard behind the shop, for example, this blue fiberglass Randmeer has a salvageable mast, which will offset the expense of disposing of its hull and deck.

“You can put it in the water and sail away with it,” says van der Pijll of this

small sailboat behind Bootdump. But since it can’t find a buyer, it will be

dismantled instead.

42 Professional BoatBuilder

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through the continued partnership between Finnboat and Kuuaskoski, which uses the same equipment for boats as it does for decommissioning end-of-life automobiles. The largest expense is transportation: If an owner is unable to bring a boat to a drop-off point, a boat can be picked up at a charge of €70 per hour.

After they’re collected, the boats are ident i f ied, measured, and stripped of their hazardous materials, such as batteries, oil, and fire extin-guishers. Unlike Bootdump, which tries to salvage as many intact pieces as possible for resale, Finland’s pro-gram pulverizes the boats and then sorts the small pieces by their mate-rial. Once a year, Kuuaskoski picks up boats from the drop-off centers and shreds them all at once. This is done separately from automobiles because of differences in materials, according to a description of Fin-land’s boat disposal procedure in the report “Disposal of End-of-Life Plastic Boats,” which was published by the Nordic Council in 2013.

Boats travel down a conveyor belt and into a “hammershredder,” a mill containing hammers attached to a rotor spinning at 600 rpm. When particles are broken down into an optimal grain size—about 40mm (1.5" )—they pass through sieves leading to another con-veyor belt that moves the particles to the separation plant. In this type of recycling, different machines use grav-ity, density, magnetism, and electric conductivity to separate and then group the small pieces by their physi-cal properties: for instance, a magnetic carpet pulls out ferrous metals like steel while a wind separator blows the remaining particles forward. Then another separator uses an electric current to project out the nonferrous metals such as aluminum from the rest of the waste stream.

Since Finland started its program—the first of its kind in Europe—other countries have followed. In Japan, 6,000 boats have been recycled since 2006, when the boat industry part-nered with the cement industry to treat, crush, and mix fiberglass into aggre-gate concrete. In France, a national boat disposal network set up in 2009 has dismantled 4,000 boats at 52 dis-posal points around the coasts. Sweden and Norway have also announced forthcoming national boat-dismantling schemes, and companies in Italy,

transported the boats to its crushing and recycling plant in Heinola.

The next year, the Finnish boat dis-posal initiative expanded, establishing 22 drop-off points at marinas and recycling terminals around Finland’s coastlines. With the trial run over, boat owners now have to pay for their boats’ disposal: €10 per meter of boat length for boats under 6m (19.6' ), and €150 per ton for larger boats. Costs are kept relatively low

dropped off by their owners at several dealers in the area with the promise that they’d never see the boats again. Accord ing to Jouku Hujo, managing director of Finnboat, the country’s marine industry association, 500 boats were collected that summer by the environmental organization Keep the Archi pelago Clean. The boat dis-mantling was mostly funded by Kuua sko ski Oyj, a leading Northern Euro pean recycling company that

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separate materials like we do.”He adds: “People don’t understand.

It’s very normal to pay for your waste, but people don’t see it as waste to get rid of. People think it has value. It’s a big step from trying to sell [your boat] to knowing it costs money [to get rid of it].” Even if a boat is worth, say, €2,000, he reasons, if you’re not using it, then within two years it’s worth nothing, because that’s what it costs in marina or mooring fees. “Some

The Cost of Unwanted BoatsConvincing owners to pay to dis-

pose of their boats is not easy. On average, five boats arrive per week at Bootdump, but owners who bring in their boats are only a fraction of the people who inquire about disposing of their boats. Says van der Pijll, “One out of seven or eight I’ll get, and others find another solution. It’s mostly not the best environmental solution. It’s mostly in backyards, and they don’t

Spain, and the United Kingdom offer boat disposal among other services.

Those efforts represent progress but not unqualified success. In Japan, for instance, few seem to know about the program. Most boat owners choose to avoid the high costs and complicated administrative procedure of the recycling program, and find cheaper ways of disposal; many boats end up in landfills. In Finland, only 100 boats were collected last year, according to Hujo. But there are an estimated 3,000 boats decommis-sioned each year from the country’s total fleet of 750,000 recreational boats, according to the 2013 Nordic Council report. The other problem is the materials. Of the boats collected, 80% are built of FRP (also called GRP in Europe) and ABS-plastic, and 20% are metal and wood. Even when boats are collected and crushed, instead of being recycled, the plastic pieces are sent to a landfill—the only practical alternative at this point.

Some interest groups in Finland would like to put the cost of boat dis-posal on new-boat producers by including it in the purchase price. Another initiative would be to follow Japan’s and Germany’s example of recycling FRP, which has been banned from landfills in Germany since 2005. The report states, “In the German recycling system, the waste is ground into small pieces, which are mixed with thermoplastic waste, becoming appropriate raw material for a cement kiln. In the kiln, the plastic components are burned to cre-ate the energy needed to heat the kiln, while the glass fibers melt and become mixed with other solid raw materials to form high-quality cement. The [project] aims to build a similar fiber-reinforced plastic recycling sys-tem in Finland.”

The report concludes: “It is not known how many boats are illegally dumped annually in Finland. Many of the typical ELB [end-of-life boats] lie in the backyards of people’s summer cottages and houses. In the past, it was common to sink an ELB or leave it in a reed bed. It is not known how common this is today, but some large-scale illegal dumpsites were recently found near Kotka [a city along the Gulf of Finland on the south coast], which indicates that it still happens. These discoveries have led to criminal investigations.”

44 Professional BoatBuilder

that’s still 400,000 boats to dispose of per year. Another cause of urgency is impending legislation, according to an ICOMIA represen tative, who cited a rather lengthy history of progressing environmental regulations, mostly focused on responsible practices for scrapping large European-flagged cargo ships. He concluded, however, that these guidelines would some day be applied to smaller recreational boats, too, possibly as early as 2018.

For a responsible boat owner, doing the right thing can be expen-sive. The French network has found the average cost to dispose of a boat in that country ranges from €300 for a small dinghy to €2,200 for a 16m (52.5' ) FRP yacht. At the conference, it was also pointed out that the last owner of a boat is also usually the least wealthy. Certainly, taxpayers don’t want to pay either but often have to if an abandoned boat is creat-ing a hazard for other traffic in a waterway. Harbormasters often call Bootdump to pick up these “orphan boats.” If the owner can’t be found, then the municipality pays for removal and must go through the courts to eliminate any legal claims before a boat can be dismantled.

Some of the cost could be offset with a recycling levy for new boats, similar to the €45 car buyers pay in The Netherlands, but in a roomful of marine industry association represen-tatives at the conference, there was no serious consideration given to adding to the price of new boats. The most popular option, by far, is also particu-larly attractive in this age of upcycling and the circular economy (terms dropped more than once at the con-ference). These boats are going to have to pay for themselves.

“The whole problem will be solved when we are able to add value to the process,” Carla Demaria, president of Monte Carlo Yachts and the Italian Marine Industry Association, said at the conference. “The solution cannot be just to add an eco tax to the pro-ducer, and can’t be done for a boat that has been abandoned.”

How do you add value to boat dis-posal? There are two approaches: Change the way boats are built, or find a way to extract value from the existing fiberglass fleet. The first approach would include building with materials that can be reused in new construction. In some industries this

Europe, the two-year Boat DIGEST (Dismantling Insight by Generating Environmental Safety Training) proj-ect study, funded by the European Boating Industry trade association, found that of 7 million pleasure boats, 95% were built of FRP. The vast major-ity are shorter than 8m (26.2' ), and have an average life of 35 years.

On a global scale, the Interna tional Council of Marine Industry Associ-ations (ICOMIA) estimates that the number of pleasure boats is 23 mil-lion worldwide (16.4 million in the U.S.), that 10% are no longer in reg-ular use, and that another 2% will fall out of use each year. The group also claims that the financial crisis in 2008 increased the number of abandoned boats.

Peter Franklin of Yacht Media (organizer of the conference along with Quaynote Communications) told participants that he calculates the number of recreational boats world-wide is even higher, at 40 million. He points out that if only 1% of the global fleet becomes redundant annually,

people make that connection, and some don’t.”

The city of Enkhuizen is just short of an hour north by intercity train from Amsterdam, where earlier that week van der Pijll was a presenter at the Future of Yacht Recycling Con ference. Held the Monday before the marine industry’s biggest trade show, METS, on November 16, 2015, the conference brought together 20 speakers from different European countries to talk about what to do with unwanted boats. Nearly every presentation included photos of sad-looking derelict boats, half-sunk or listing against a quayside, or stranded on land, looking dirty and worn, with rust stains, missing planks, chipped paint, and torn canvas. They are visi-ble in the U.S., too; they’re plentiful along the Intracoastal Waterway and can often be found stashed in back-yards and behind marinas throughout the country.

The problem is that many FRP boats, first built on a mass-production scale 60 years ago, are getting old. In

Two examples in the global fleet of unwanted boats,

whose numbers may be increasing by as

many as 400,000 per year, according

to one estimate.

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when the Volvo boats reach the end of their lifetime, the basalt can be melted into virgin fibers, which would then be used to build Optimist boats for children. He says that the high cost of the materials would be met by creating excitement and thus market demand for boats with an adventurous past as ocean racers, and by increas ing the value for sponsors, who would see their investment extend into the next generation of boats and boat buyers.

“We realized that if you go and talk about the circular economy to boat-yards, it’s not something that’s rele-vant to them,” says Benco. “We need to create awareness in the market about circular economy, about sus-tainability. We need to create hype.”

In the afternoon, Paul Gramsma of the Dutch company Extreme Eco-Solutions, took the podium and con-fidently declared, “We can recycle GRP. One-hundred percent.” His statement points to the second approach to reducing the cost of boat disposal: finding a way to somehow make money from the existing pile of aging, discarded boats, mostly con-structed of FRP. His company offers two processes for recycling developed by the research lab Sintef, in Norway. The first mixes a powder of ground-down FRP with a patented coupling agent, which works as an additive during the production of polyethylene products, such as pipelines, foil, and film. Gramsma says plastics made with the additive are 10%–20% stron-ger, making it possible to either build a stronger product or use less mate-rial. The second option is to separate the fiberglass and resin through chemical recovery for use in new composite materials.

To be cost-effective, however, the recycling must be done in volume that can be provided by an industry like windmill manufacturing, which typically produces 10%–20% in pro-duction waste, all in uniformly sized pieces. “The problem is if you do this recycling only on boats, there is abso-lutely no money to be made,” said Gramsma. And it works only on new, virgin FRP. “If you have boats 30–40 years old, of course that’s a different quality of waste. The problem is we recycle glass-fiber-reinforced plastics. Not metal, not wood [or bottom paint or other materials that may be attached to boats]. We can only recy-cle clean GRP.”

presentation, he proposed construct-ing Volvo Ocean race boats of basalt fiber. That technology, he says, was developed in Russia after World War II but never took hold in the West because of the rising popularity of glass, and because basalt’s quality tended to be inconsistent (Benco says he’s found a producer who has changed the chemistry to improve consistency). In his model he specu-lates that after four or five years,

is already regulated, such as the European Union’s End-of-Life Vehicle Directive, which requires 85% of a new auto mobile be made of reus-able or recycl able materials. But without regulation, the only way to justify the added costs of these mate-rials would be to create market demand, says Enrico Benco, whose project “Go Sailing, for a Change” focuses on reducing the environ-mental impact of sailboats. In his

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For instance, if a steel boat came in and van der Pijll sold it to a steel company for scrap, it’s waste; but if the complete boat is sold as a boat, it’s not waste. “It’s the same boat. It’s the same steel. It makes a difference. The regulations, sometimes they tell you different stories about what to do,” says van der Pijll. Another exam-ple he gave was if he took in a boat with 10 liters (2.6 gal) of diesel left over in a canister. “I’m not allowed to

rules and regulations. Slowly it’s changing, but it takes a lot of time.”

Another problem is that labor con-ditions for waste facilities are stricter than those for boatbuilding ones. “Once a boat is entered into a yard [for disposal], it’s considered waste,” Klok says. “[The yard] has to meet the same conditions for a chemical plant, and that’s the problem. The small businesses don’t have the means to deal with this matter.”

After that session on recycling, I met van der Pijll on a coffee break. He brought out a chunk of plastic roughly the size and bulk of a desk-top computer that had been smashed in half with an ax. I didn’t recognize it as any specific part of a boat, but its curves, paint, and wood, and metal hardware make that origin clear enough. More importantly, the combi-nation of all those materials in such a small piece makes it obvious how dif-ficult it is to easily separate them for recycling. He’d like to find a way to bridge the gap between the technol-ogy that can recycle only clean FRP and the growing problem of what to do about unwanted boats. “As long as burning it is cheaper than labor, there’s no other solution for us at the moment.”

He travels to two or three con-ferences like this a year. “I never call it a problem, because the solution is there. Only we need to work on it together.”

The Bootdump WayBootdump is one of two Dutch

boat dismantlers. With transportation being a significant part of the cost (usu ally around 30%), a proposed boat-dismantling network with four or five facilities in various strategic loca-tions around the country would help reduce those expenses. But according to Gerwin Klok, of the Netherlands Yachtbuilding Industry, plans for two more dismantlers have been held up by the country’s layers of bureau-cracy, which require compliance with European Union regulations, as well as national, provincial, and county regulations. “They’re not unanimous, and that’s really frustrating,” says Klok, who describes 40 lawyers work-ing to overcome these differences (the country’s boatbuilding associa-tion is connected with the much-larger steel industry, and has access to those resources).

“We have a lot of regulations and a lack of regulations because boat dis-mantling is a new thing,” says van der Pijll. “If you don’t fit in the regula-tions, you have a problem.” Because there are no boat-dismantling rules for smaller recreational boats, he’s held to the same standards as ones for larger commercial vessels like cargo ships and ferries. “This is a bit silly. I am in constant discussion with the environmental department about

48 Professional BoatBuilder

here this week, including the yellow sailboat and the Randmeer mentioned earlier. Larger vessels are dismantled in a second location leased from a sand company in a more industrial area of Eink huizen, about a five-minute car ride away. This week, among the sand piles and heavy equip-ment at work nearby, there are about five boats in various stages of dis-assembly looking like sunken wrecks exposed by a dried-up sea.

When van der Pijll described a day at Bootdump to the conference, he showed a photo of their surprisingly low-tech tools: hammer, wrench, circular saw, and handsaw. Boats are taken apart by hand here. First, the

outboard engine bracket. It was a €15 part, but without it, he would have had to throw out the entire engine. Boot dump cus tomers are typically building or restoring wooden boats and looking for original parts they can’t buy new anymore.

“Most people who come to us repair their boats themselves. They know what they are looking for,” says van der Pijll. “Some need advice, but that’s all right.”

In the last eight years, Bootdump has grown to a full-time business, employing five people from two sites. The first is behind the shop, where van der Pijll and his crew dismantle small boats. Six or seven boats are

put it in my car, because it’s chemical waste.” Instead, he pays to send all chemicals to a specialist in chemical waste disposal.

Van der Pijll may be in the waste business, but his knowledge of boat-building makes it possible to recog-nize which parts have value and which don’t. Open every Thursday and Fri-day, the shop is tucked behind a resi-dential street of narrow red brick houses. Over the years the space has grown from one building to three. Inside, shoppers browse aisles of shelves holding winches, sheets, blocks, cleats, and masts, with red, white, and blue Dutch flags hanging along the fixtures. In a separate open space, engines are spaced evenly on a cement floor.

This afternoon, on the Fri day after the conference, a customer has found an

The cost to dispose of chemicals and old paint cans, considered hazardous waste,

figures into van der Pijll’s boat-dismantling expenses.

Most of Bootdump’s store customers are looking for parts they need when building or restoring their boats. They’ll find just about anything of value taken off end-of-life boats, carefully sorted on shelves, including Dutch flags, life preservers, metal hardware, coiled line, and rigging components.

50 Professional BoatBuilder

discovered a factory that recycles used mattresses. Once their fabric covers have been removed, the cush-ions can be ground up along with the mattresses into material for making new cushions. Not everything is sys-tematic, however. At the site where the larger boats are taken apart, chunks of oak from the hull of a 25m (82' ) shrimp boat built 50 years ago are stored loosely under a tarp. They will go into his woodstove. For the boat’s wheelhouse, perched above on a corrugated shed, he has no appar-ent plans, but you never know. Some-times van der Pijll sells pieces as nautical décor at tourist events, like a fisherman’s festival. There have also been a couple of interesting one-off projects, including boats repurposed into benches by Amsterdam’s Cen tral Station and a ship’s cabin recon-structed as an artist’s office.

Because of the various places mate-rials can go, he can’t give an easy estimate of the cost per boat. “So sometimes [boat owners] have to pay or sometimes I pay for a boat, like if there’s a very good engine…it depends

mast comes down, then out goes the engine and any other part that can be used secondhand or is envi-ronmentally toxic, like batteries, zincs, and any chemicals. Then they begin tearing the boat apart by ripping off the deck.

Van der Pi j l l is constantly researching options for extracting value from pieces that can’t be reused as boat parts. Some may still have value in their material, such as the keel, usually lead or iron. With boats being such a small part of the waste stream, he must look to other industries, like recyclers of household waste, for more disposal options. For instance, boat cush-ions were previously burned with other useless waste, but then he

If a decent working engine can be extracted from a boat, it could make the difference between whether van der Pijll sees value in a boat brought here—or not.

aPril/May 2016 51

and entered into the computer pro-gram. Each entry includes a photo-graph and details such as which boat it came from, its color, materials, size, weight, and condition, and where it’s located in the shop. This internal cataloging may one day be part of Hol land’s existing online cata-log of boat parts, Fastnet, used by

expenses, such as transporting the boat, and earnings from materials and salvageable parts. “In a year’s time I can see what the boat has brought me. At the moment, it’s only my experiences in the last eight years [that inform the estimates].”

To track the parts, every piece with potential for resale is given a barcode

on transportation and cost. It could be €100 or it could be €1,000.”

He’s working on improving his esti-mates by methodically cataloging every part of every boat. On the shop computer, set up under an air duct in the same space as the engines and related parts, he registers each boat, recording weight, size, year, his

At Bootdump’s nearby dismantling site for larger boats, the wheelhouse of a 25m (82') shrimp boat sits on top of a corrugated shed (left), while the oak that was once its hull (above) will eventually go into the woodstove.

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FRP, because of the popu larity of steel and aluminum in The Nether-lands, a proportion that helps a boat dismantler’s bottom line, but makes life difficult when steel prices are down, as they are now. “The steel price is very low,” says van der Pijll. “It’s 30% down from four years ago. Also, for me it’s a struggle. We get paid per kilo. If the price goes down, I still have to do the same work.”

Asked if he can still make a living, he pauses, then smiles and pats his stomach. “We drink a cheaper bottle of wine. It’s okay.”

About the Author: Melissa Wood is Professional BoatBuilder’s associate editor.

that can’t be sold, recycled, or other-wise disposed of. For fiberglass, van der Pijll pays €200 a ton to send it to a nearby incinerator. He also pays €30 a ton to dispose of wood. On the other hand, he makes €60 a ton for steel sold as scrap metal. In this instance, the Bootdump model may be uniquely suited to its location. Klok says only 30% of the Dutch fleet is

300 marine businesses. Van der Pijll is still experimenting to see if it can be profitable. If he’s spending hours going back and forth with a customer about a €2 part, that’s not logical, he says; it’s not even worth the half hour spent entering it into the computer. But if he’s able to sell, say, 30 items at a time, “then it’s interesting.”

Finally, he must discard the materials

Van der Pijll enters each boat and every part into a software program to track their value and expenses, and a part’s location in the store. He’s hoping the system will lead to better estimates for future boats that come in for disposal.