The use of ELIUM resin in building laminated fiberglass or carbon fiber boats is said to necessitate new manufacturing facilites, as the techniques needed are incompatible with those used with tradition polyester resins used in boat building. This is expected to contribute to higher costs if ELIUM resin is used, perhaps a 15-percent increase in production cost just due to use of ELIUM.
ELIUM is also claimed to have additional desirable properties, such as:
- to have greater strength and better impact resistance (compared to other laminates and resins that are described only as “traditional materials”);
- to be styrene-free and BPA-free; and
- to exhibit low viscosity, long reactivity (gobbledygook for long curing time perhaps), and “extremely low” exothermy (more gobbledgook perhaps for not curing with an exothermic chemical reaction).
A report in the industry periodical “Soundings—Trade Only” for July 2023 on page 35 says that Brunswick has built a non-production boat designated the BOSTON WHALER SP110 using the ELIUM resin, and has displayed this boat at recent boat shows in the United States. There is also a mention that “the company” (which could be a reference to Brunswick or to their Boston Whaler division) “plans to build about 50 production boats next year [2024] using this new class of resin.”
There is a quoted statement from Andrea Shen, sourcing category manager at Brunswick Boat Group, as follows:
For decades, Brunswick has actively pursued the production of environmentally responsible products. Working with ELIUM to improve the recyclability of fiberglass boats is our next step in this journey.
Unless you have been asleep for twenty years, you must know that corporations have been under pressure from activist to demonstrate their concern for and response to environmental pollution. This is known as ESG investing, as in Environmental, Social, and Governance.
It seems to me that worrying about recycling old Boston Whaler boats might not be the most useful realm of manufacturing with plastics if you want to contribute to improved recycling of plastic materials. Right now in 2023, there are many Boston Whaler boats that are 30 or 40 or 50-years old and are still in useful service as recreational boats. In contrast, there are billions of flimsy plastic bottles holding 12-ounces of some beverage that are strictly one-time-use.
Why obsess about how a newly manufactured 2024 Boston Whaler boat is going to be (perhaps) easier to be recycled in 2074, 50 years in the future? If the activists take further control of our society, recreational boating itself will soon be another of their targets.
ASIDE
I find the quoted comment from a Brunswick manager to have obnoxious language—corporate speech. We are told the corporation, Brunswick, is in “pursuit” of environmentally enhanced products, and they are on a “journey” to reach them. These sound like heroic descriptions of a noble personage making a trek to a holy site. Let’s be realistic. Brunswick makes million-dollar plastic boats powered by as many as four 600-HP gasoline engines. They are not a shinning knight on a quest for the holy grail.