Sail to Shelter | Racing Sail Repurposing

Max Ring, Navami Prabhu, Rachel Strawn, Savannah Strickland

Sail to Shelter, a non-profit organization and sponsor of this team, is committed to keeping racing sails from piling up in landfills by giving them a second life. Sail racing’s high level of competition results in the disposal of sails after just a few uses. To keep up with this demand, over 3 million square yards of sail fabric are produced each year, and 97% of that ends up in landfills. Our team’s task was to repurpose woven polyethylene terephthalate (PET) sails into a product that can be used for humanitarian aid.

PET sails are a highly durable and water resistant woven material that are coated and impregnated with a melamine-based mixture. One of the first questions this project proposed was, do we want to pursue recycling or repurposing this material? We decided to pursue both paths.

For recycling, we were planning to melt down the sails due to the thermoplastic properties of PET and turn them into yarn that could then be knit into blankets or sleeping bags. Through research and experimentation, we eventually found that vegetable oil is a promising solvent for the coating and impregnations, giving the material the ability to melt.

The bulk of our project was spent repurposing the sail material. We brainstormed many ideas relating to humanitarian aid. We defined measurables for each product, conducted background research on current products and made design iterations. We ultimately decided to pursue the semipermanent structure and inflatable bed. We tested and analyzed the material’s air permeability, water resistance, flame resistance and comfort, as well as the tensile strength and air permeability of different seams.

Our shelter prototype is a spacious, water resistant tipi shaped structure made up of triangular panels of sail material held together with industrial sewing and water-resistant seam tape. The material is padded with an environmentally conscious, flame resistant coating to insure the safety of refugees. Our inflatable bed prototype is made up of two rectangular cut sail pieces that are calendered (heated and pressed) to improve the softness, sono bonded together, then calendered again to make the seams air tight. The bed can be inflated with or without electricity to accommodate different circumstances.