Old hulls, new life: how ReBoat rebuilds and recycles yachts

A 1987 Jeanneau Sun Magic 44 is turning heads at the Grand Pavois boat show in La Rochelle this September, and it doesn't look nearly 40 years old. The yacht has been stripped down and completely refurbished by ReBoat, a company from sail racing hub Lorient in Brittany that makes yachts at the end of their lifespan as good as new.

ReBoat launched in 2024 and has already refurbished eight sailing yachts, monohulls and catamarans alike, in the hall of the former France Nautisme shipyard. The idea is straightforward: take a solid old hull, fit the latest instruments and a new interior built to today's standards, and hand it back to a sailor at a fraction of new-boat money. Such good-as-new yachts from ReBoat can cost 30 to 40 percent less than a new yacht of comparable size.

Co-founder of ReBoat, Dimitri Caudrelier, brother of the well-known ocean racing sailor Charles Caudrelier, explained the reasoning to French magazine Voile & Moteur. "The marine industry depends on a fragile environment: the ocean. We recognise how crucial the ocean is for life on earth. The linear economy, in which raw materials are used once and then disposed to leave in nature, is just no longer an option. It makes no sense any more. Especially when you realise that yachts and leisure boats remain in the dock for the majority of the time, while they are being built to withstand the big forces and impact of sailing on big waves, it is just an enormous waste of the hull to demolish it."

Hulls built in the 1980s and 1990s still have plenty left in them. Stripped down to the basic construction, with inspection and, if necessary, renewal of the keel and rudder, a yacht can be rebuilt to 2020s standards.

Charter fleets are the next target. Companies managing rental boat fleets need to update them regularly, and refurbishing existing yachts instead of building new ones could cut material use at scale. To set up production capable of servicing larger rental fleets rapidly, ReBoat is now seeking investors, a bigger production hall and skilled crew.

Meanwhile in Hamburg, Germany, a separate company, also called ReBoat, is tackling the other end of the problem. Founders Jens Mahnke and Mark Walberg started up in the autumn of 2024 after noticing the number of abandoned boats sitting in marinas, on the hard, in backyards and on wasteland, with nowhere to go once their working life is over.

Their approach is dismantling rather than rebuilding. They take the boat apart to salvage all the usable parts and separate out the recyclable materials. There is value in those materials, which lowers the cost of demolition and recycling for the owners of an end-of-life boat.

The founders estimate that some 300,000 boats across Europe are sitting somewhere waiting to be picked up, demolished and recycled. As the boat recycling duo put it, "What at first manifests as an environmental problem, with polyester resin, glass fibre, oil in the engine and antifouling coating on the bottom, can also bee seen as a stockpile of materials that can be harvested for re-use."

Owners who contribute their boat for recycling benefit from a fair share of the value of the materials they bring in. In some cases, where the cost of demolishing the boat can be kept low and the volume of recyclable material is high, owners may even earn money from supplying their end-of-life boat. In other cases, the cost of dismantling and recycling is simply reduced by the share in the value of materials, a method the company founders argue will increase the acceptance of recycling in the leisure boat industry.