MarineShift360

11th Hour Racing Sponsorship

MarineShift360 is a partnership-driven international collaboration that aims to drive positive, sustainable changes towards design and manufacturing in the marine industry. The bespoke Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) tool will enable the user to evaluate and compare materials and processes, investigate alternatives, and drive innovation to allow informed, environmentally and economically sustainable choices.

A Life Cycle Assessment is a way to understand the resource footprint of a product over its entire lifetime from cradle to grave. Once completed, the tool will use industry-wide, reliable datasets to compare choices and investigate alternatives at the design stage to increase efficiency and reduce costs without compromising on performance.

The end goal is to empower the marine industry to fully understand the environmental footprint of its products and enable a shift to a circular economy. This is critical for business and is driven by potential future environmental legislation, consumer demand, and the urgent need to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

A selection of initiatives through this partnership includes:

• Deliver a marine industry Life Cycle Assessment tool that facilitates smart choices within design and manufacturing processes.
• Measure 6 different environmental markers to provide a resource footprint. This includes a product’s global warming potential (kgCO2e), nonrenewable resource depletion, water consumption, marine eutrophication, energy consumption, and waste production.
• Establish Pilot Partners with a variety of industry leaders in their fields to further develop the LCA tool. Partners will provide data from their materials and processes, which will create a fully comprehensive database.
• Use industry-wide data to continuously develop the tool on a platform designed specifically for the marine industry.
• Provide a platform that encourages collaboration across the marine community to quantify its environmental impact better, share sustainability best practices, and inspire positive change.

Background

11th Hour Racing is the founding sponsor of MarineShift360. The project was initiated during the British challenge for the 35th America’s cup in 2017.