MarineShift360

MarineShift360 is a partnership-driven international collaboration that aims to drive sustainable design and manufacturing in the marine industry. The purpose-built 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. The tool uses 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 processes 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 features 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 Partnerships with a variety of industry leaders in their fields to further develop the LCA tool. Partners provide critical feedback, and 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.
• The MarineShift360 life cycle assessment tool is certified in accordance with the standards for life cycle assessment: ISO 14040:2006 and ISO 14044:2006.  
• Individual outputs and reports generated through the use of MarineShift360 must be separately reviewed to confirm compliance to ISO 14040:2006 and ISO 14044:2006 if compliance to these standards is required by the tool user. This process will be straightforward if the MarineShift360 tool guidance has been followed and the report template has been used as intended.

Background

11th Hour Racing is the founding sponsor of MarineShift360, and our objective is to empower the marine industry to fully understand the environmental footprint of its products and make a measurable shift from a linear to a circular economy.