Ellen MacArthur—now Dame Ellen MacArthur—was a boater, a sail boater, a racer, a professional boater. In 2005 she set the record for the fastest solo circumnavigation of the globe. In 2010 she retired from professional sailing, and launched the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, dedicated to accelerating the transition to a circular economy.
If you haven’t heard of the concept of the circular economy, it is described as follows:
A circular economy is a regenerative system in which resource input and waste, emission, and energy leakage are minimized by slowing, closing, and narrowing material and energy loops. This can be achieved through long-lasting design, maintenance, repair, reuse, remanufacturing, refurbishing, and recycling. This is in contrast to a linear economy which is a 'take, make, dispose' model of production.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circular_economy
The foundation just recently released a report on the textile and fashion industry. You might not immediately associate the textile and fashion industry with boating, but the report reveals some amazing information. The reports says:
Clothes are an everyday necessity, and for many an important expression of individuality. Yet the industry’s current take-make-dispose model is the root cause of many environmental impacts and substantial economic value loss. Every second, the equivalent of one garbage truck of textiles is landfilled or burned. An estimated USD 500 billion value is lost every year due to clothing that’s barely worn and rarely recycled. If nothing changes, by 2050 the fashion industry will use up a quarter of the world’s carbon budget. As well as being wasteful, the industry is polluting: clothes release half a million tonnes of microfibres into the ocean every year, equivalent to more than 50 billion plastic bottles. Microfibres are likely impossible to clean up and can enter food chains.
This is an amazing report: "Every second, the equivalent of one garbage truck of textiles is landfilled or burned."
Ellen MacArthur herself urges:
Today’s textile industry is built on an outdated linear, take-make-dispose model and is hugely wasteful and polluting. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s report ‘A new textiles economy: Redesigning fashion’s future’ presents an ambitious vision of a new system, based on circular economy principles, that offers benefits to the economy, society, and the environment. We need the whole industry to rally behind it.”
How many recreational boats would have to consume how much gasoline fuel every second to produce as much global pollution? The EPA is loading more ammunition in a gun to point at the American automobile industry, the American boating industry, the American railroad industry, the American trucking industry and the American boat building industry to reduce atmospheric emissions, but the fashion industry has escaped all notice and all regulation.
I am very happy with my 22-year-old truck, towing my my 27-year-old Boston Whaler boat, on its 25-year-old galvanized steel trailer, and I am very happy the ultra-low emission outboard engine I have been using for the past ten years.
Now the 70-year-old-house that I live in could be better, but I am mostly happy with that, too.
And the all-wool cardigan sweater with leather arm patches that I wore to dinner with friends last night is over 25-years-old.