For World Oceans Day we sat down with each department at RS HQ to find out what the teams are doing to be more sustainable and protect our playground. The core team at RS Sailing are life-long sailors who love being on the water. We would like to think we’ve developed some great boats for people like us and for the next generation of sailors, so we want to do our part to protect the environment we all enjoy sailing in.
RS Sailing has, therefore, implemented a Sustainability Programme – analysing, improving, and publicising recyclable aspects of our boats, recyclable packaging, clean energy sources, almost paperless office functions, our operations and waste recycling. This as an ongoing programme, we’re not perfect and the job will never be done!
Technical
- Our plastic boats are recyclable. Did you know you can drop them at RS HQ, we will strip the hull of fixtures and fittings and we will send them off to be responsibility recycled. The hull will be ground up and reproduced into underground water tanks, traffic cones and underwater junction boxes!
- When considering the design of our sailboats there are three main sustainable features we look to incorporate. Can they be stackable? Can they be made more lightweight? Can recycled materials be used?
- Every manufacturing decision the tech team make they ask the question: “Can we do this in a more sustainable way?”
Finance
- The Finance Team are proud of being a 99% paperless office, nothing is printed and they require invoices/purchase orders to be emailed in.
- One of their main aims is to identify and cut waste, we look at everything from excess material usage to how much water we can save by adjusting our urinal flushes (glamorous we know!).
- We have long sourced electricity from renewable providers and our gas contract is carbon neutral!
Parts & Customer Care
- The Parts Team are constantly developing our packing from the RS Sailing Store to reduce the amount of waste and to use as much recyclable material as possible.
- Our new top covers are now designed with a built-in bag! Which means not only does it save on plastic packaging when new but it also lasts longer as it’s easier to look after.
- Our new sails are shipped with no plastic packaging, just beautifully rolled in the sail bag.
Operations
- The wrap around our boats may look like plastic but it’s actually made of reconstructed sugar starch which is a lot better for the planet! It’s pretty cool!
- Our Ops Team work tirelessly to make sure we ship containers as efficiently as possible, features like our stacking hulls, custom boat cradle systems and nearly 3 decades of experience means that we ship as little air as possible to reduce our carbon footprint.
- We have our very own cardboard compactor on site here at RS HQ which means that we can squish all our used cardboard into huge bales which are then sent off for recycling!
Marketing & Events
- The Marketing Team made a huge effort to reduce the amount of printing and paper handouts we use at boat shows and we are so glad that our customers are supportive of the change. It only ends up in a cluttered drawer at home anyway!
- We reuse our pink Astroturf at all our outdoor boat shows, 5 years on and it’s still as pink as ever!
- We’re pushing hard to make our events more sustainable, from banning single use plastics, to using electronic event notice boards, and designing boats that stack in containers so we don’t ship air when sending boats to events in containers.
Sales Team
- The Sales team are pushing to be as logistically efficient as possible when doing demo’s around the country by tying in multiple clubs on one trip and we do the same when delivering boats to our customers too!
- The team use virtual meetings to try and reduce unnecessary trips in the car and on planes.
- 90% paperless office, we are trying to convince the team to give up their notebooks but they’re surprisingly protective of them.
Find out more about World Oceans Day and our sustainability efforts by following the links.
Share this!
