12-month agreement to reduce the environmental impact from IMOCA boats
10th September 2022 – Today MarineShift360, the first marine industry specific lifecycle assessment tool (LCA) and the International Monohull Open Class Association (IMOCA) have announced a formal partnership focused on understanding the environmental impacts of high performance offshore racing. As part of the agreement, MarineShift360 will become an official sustainability partner to the IMOCA, facilitating the class in analysing and understanding their full lifecycle impacts.
The partnership follows on from the MarineShift360 development period, where IMOCA was a pilot partner involved in developing the MarineShift360 platform. The Class will continue to run a class wide lifecycle assessment involving all competing teams. The aim of the partnership is to understand the true environmental impact of building and campaigning the IMOCA Open 60, with the long-term goal of introducing rules and regulations that will reduce the environmental impacts of high-performance boat building and racing, not just within the IMOCA but across the wider offshore racing community.
A key benefit of the partnership is to utilise learnings from the IMOCA, which operate at the leading edge of marine technology development, to share across the wider marine industry.
Imogen Dinham-Price, Sustainability Consultant at IMOCA, commented:
“Our partnership with MarineShift360 has already proven so vital for both IMOCA and our marine sector. Today, we have started collecting data from our new IMOCA builds and have already begun compiling the results of 4. For IMOCA, having this level of information around the impact of boat construction will allow us to put in place precise rules for the next cycle. This could be anything from specifying low impact construction processes, to 100% recyclable moulds. Altogether catalysing the advances in boat design and construction through sharing knowledge within the industry and beyond. So we could not be more excited to continue this journey together with MarineShift360.”
Ollie Taylor, Project Director for MarineShift360 at Anthesis Group, added:
“We are thrilled to continue our ongoing relationship with IMOCA and work together towards a common goal. We are focused on enabling businesses to make sustainable design decisions, informed by clear data. The learnings and outputs from this partnership will be truly beneficial, not only to IMOCA members but the marine industry as a whole.”
Designed by marine industry experts for marine designers, manufacturers, boat builders and engineers, the MarineShift360 software tool enable users to fully understand the environmental footprint of products and processes by quickly assessing their impact. By identifying efficiencies, the LCA tool allows users to reduce environmental impact and costs without compromising performance. The tool is backed by MarineShift360’s founding sponsor, 11th Hour Racing and developed and managed by one of the world’s leading sustainability consultancies, Anthesis.