Shrink wrap protects boats all winter, but where does it go after that?

One-time-use plastics — products which are useful for a short time but will stick around in landfills for centuries — are the bane of environmentalists. In some instances, it’s hard to find any alternative. Such is the case with shrinkable plastic ubiquitously used to protect boats in winter storage.

Tons of the plastic are used annually, both by marine professionals and by individual boaters, and this time of year is when that plastic is removed so boaters can enjoy the sunshine and fresh air. For the plastic, though, it’s most likely a one-way trip to a landfill.

“We’d all like to be able to do something with it other than putting it in the waste stream,” said Bruce Wright, chief executive officer and president of Irwin Marine in Laconia. “Right now, there’s no valid option that we can see.”

The plastic used for storing boats is effective at what it does, marina operators say. Sheets of the plastic are draped over the cockpits of boats, often with wooden strapping underneath to give the plastic a peak to slough off snow and rain. When a heat gun is applied to the plastic, it pulls tight to the hull of the ship, keeping the interior of the boat clean and dry for the next season.

“I’ve been in the industry for 10 years; I’ve been around boats my whole life,” said John Whalley, general manager of Silver Sands Marina in Gilford, adding he can’t remember ever seeing another material being used for outdoor storage. “We have boats up to 60 feet long and we can’t put them inside,” he said.

If tarps or canvas were used, the risk of tears or loose edges allow for intrusion of foreign materials. “Then water, dirt and mold would fill the boat all winter long,” he said. “There’s never been a better solution.”

In the springtime, Irwin has to order roll-off containers to collect all of the plastic the marina has to discard. Wright figures Irwin Marine goes through five tons of shrink wrap each year.

“We’d be happy to work on a solution,” Wright said. “The whole Marine Association would.”

Once recyclable, now trash

In fact, the New Hampshire Marine Trades Association had, at one point, operated a recycling program for shrink wrap. Ed Crawford, founder of Winni Marine, explained.

“Back then, quite a bit of shrink wrap was generated, and there were buyers that would buy the plastic,” Crawford said. He recalled a procedure to cut the large pieces down to a manageable size, then loaded into a waste hauler, and the strapping and other materials were saved for the next season.

“There was very little that wasn’t reused or recycled,” Crawford said. The program, organized entirely by the state Marine Trades Association, ran for about 15 years, then ended several years ago.

Crawford said the program started out strong, even producing some revenue for the association.

“We went from getting $0.30 a pound to $0.15 cents a pound, then $0.10,” Crawford said. There was a point when the association didn’t gain any income, then it actually cost the members to recycle the material, and finally the recycler refused to accept the material.

A spokesperson for Nextrex, a company that makes decking and benches out of recycled plastics, said they used to accept boat wrap plastic, but the environmental contamination from sitting outside all winter made the material too problematic to take.

“There’s been some companies here and there” that seem to have found a way to use the material for a new purpose, Crawford said, but they haven’t yet followed through on their promises. “There was one that was looking to use them for guardrails, but they went bankrupt before they ever collected any.”

Without a way to recycle the plastic, Winni Marine, which has three locations in the Lakes Region, ceased offering outdoor storage for boats. Now, they only store boats indoors, where wraps aren’t needed.

“We don’t store any shrink-wrapped boats, we decided to get out of the business,” Crawford said. “What do you do with all the plastic if you can’t recycle it?”

Buoyed by hope

The challenge is tricky, but there are people working on solutions. Whalley, at Silver Sands, is excited about a newly developed kind of wrap that manufacturers claim will biodegrade even in a landfill. He said Silver Sands did a trial run of the product this past winter, and it performed as well as conventional shrink wrap.

“We store 500 boats a year, probably 300 of the 500 are shrink wrapped,” Whalley said, noting even a moderately better solution would translate to a significant improvement because of the scale of the problem.. “The volume is massive.”

Others are looking again at recycling, and taking encouragement from another local success story. There used to be no means to recycle polystyrene foam until the Town of Gilford, with technical assistance from the Lakes Region Planning Commission, purchased a densifier machine to convert foam products into a uniform material, which manufacturers would accept.

Matt Rose, an environmental planner with LRPC, said his organization is in the beginning stages of exploring the plastic problem, with the hope of generating a strategy to create a regional means to divert the boat wrap from landfills. That process is starting this summer with information gathering from various stakeholders, including boat dealers and waste facility operators.

“We are at our very start of this,” Rose said. There are many who hope the effort succeeds in identifying a workable solution.

“We’re all in favor of it,” Crawford said.

“I hope we don’t have to continue throwing plastic into the Dumpster,” said Whalley.