MarineShift360, the partnership-driven collaboration developing a new Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) tool for the marine industry, welcomes Marlow Ropes as a new Pilot Partner.  Marlow will contribute valuable data to further develop MarineShift360’s bespoke LCA tool ahead of its commercial release. Along with Marlow, these new partnerships further strengthen the MarineShift360 industry collaboration, which now features an additional 10 marine businesses, including Allen Brothers, Arksen, Emkay Plastics, Multiplast, Princess Yachts, RS Sailing and Wessex Resins.

Motivated by consumer demand and expected changes to legislation, the marine industry is under the spotlight to make advances in closed-loop product design, moving away from the linear ‘take-make-waste’ approach and towards a circular economy. In collaboration with Founding Sponsor 11th Hour Racing, an international organisation that harnesses the power of sport to innovate change for the health of our oceans, MarineShift360 is actively developing its LCA tool to equip the industry with the means to understand product sustainability.

The LCA tool quantifies the environmental impacts of a product’s full life cycle, from raw materials at the beginning to disposal at the end of a product’s life,allowing the user to make informed decisions at the design stage to mitigate such impacts. As a Pilot Partner, Marlow will work alongside MarineShift360 to tailor the tool to the unique needs of marine businesses in a bid to empower the wider industry to make smart choices within design and manufacturing processes. The project will continue to forge development partnerships to further enhance the performance of the tool, with the vision of creating a tool that is built by the industry, for the industry.

Emma Donovan at Marlow Ropes, says: “We are extremely committed to sustainable manufacturing processes and doing all that we can to implement environmentally conscious initiatives throughout all our processes from the yarn that we source, to our rope manufacturing methods, our waste and recycling goals and our sustainable packaging endeavours. In light of our environmental objectives, partnering with MarineShift360 makes absolute sense to us. Using the LCA tool allows us to monitor where our efforts are making an impact, and where further improvements are needed. For the marine industry at large, it has never been more urgent for all businesses and manufacturers to audit and understand their own processes and the impact they have on the very environment that we all rely on so heavily.”

The MarineShift360 LCA tool will be launched at METS Trade 2019.