Sailing can be one of the greenest activities to enjoy. But the increased complexity and size of sailboats have made sailing less environmentally friendly than it could be. In his new book “Sustainble Sailing: Go Green When You Cast Off,” Portland, Ore. author and editor Dieter Loibner explains how sailors can reduce their environmental impact and be a positive force for change. The author of “The Folkboat Story,” Loibner is an editor for Soundings magazine and has written about boats and the history of sailing for more than 20 years. He will be at the Seattle Boat Show from 4 to 9 p.m. on Saturday, Jan. 30 and from noon to 2 p.m. on Sunday, Jan. 31. You can find him at the Armchair Sailor booth (East 1319) in Qwest Field Event Center. Three Sheets Northwest caught up with Loibner during a recent visit to Seattle.

What prompted you to write this book?
I think it’s time that we start to think about something else than just our own convenience and our own little universes. We’ve got to move out of the center and consider not just what we’re doing to the environment, but to other people, who have the same right to be on this planet as we do, believe it or not.

Sailing seems like an inherently green activity. What can make it less environmentally friendly?
We use toxic bottom paints to keep the boat clean and fast and slick. We use combustion engines, which pollute air and water. We pump raw sewage into the water. This book has a dual mission: to create awareness through education and to offer solutions that are readily available and can be implemented by individuals and organizations without a lot of cost and without a lot of changing the lifestyle, because after all, we do this for fun, and if we lose the fun, we won’t do it. That’s not the intent of this book to scare people away from the sport of sailing.

Are bottom paints and fuel the main culprits?
You look at what happens to a sail when it’s done. How many people keep sails in their basement, not knowing what to do with them? There are places where you can turn them over to have a second life. An old sail always remains an old sail, but it can become a deck chair, it can become a tote bag.

And what are we doing with the boats that are no longer boats, and have reached the end of their life cycle? How can we recycle fiberglass, or is there a way to produce a smarter, cleaner fiberglass that will have value when it becomes a recyclable? There is a lot of thinking, a lot of engineering to do, which I think is well within the capacity of technology today and the human intellect. But we haven’t done it for various reasons, and mostly it hinges on profitability and convenience. I think there will have to be a change in thinking and attitude to overcome this. I don’t think it’s a technical problem or a financial problem. It’s a problem of attitude and values.

How can we address the environmental impacts associated with fiberglass boats?
Fiberglass is frozen snot, as (boat designer, naval architect and author) L. Francis Herreshoff derided it, and it’s as much cure as it is a problem to the industry. We wouldn’t be boating today if we didn’t have fiberglass, at least not to the same extent. It’s very easy to make multiple copies of the same design, which also has kept boating from developing as quickly and efficiently as it may have done otherwise.

That already has been done, so we have to think, is a landfill the best final solution for a boat that’s being cut up after 40 or 50 years? In some places like the U.S. it is, because landfill is cheap. In some places like Europe it is not, because landfill is expensive. There are places that you cannot put a boat into a landfill, so you have to find other ways—turning it into feed stock for a kiln, or for power generation, and so forth.

But there is no institutionalized or a defined process for how this could happen, and the standard answer that you get is, ‘Well, it has to be subsidized, it has to be incentivized by the government, we’ve got to get tax breaks in order to do it.’ And if you wait for the government to tell you something, I think that is probably the worst situation that can put this off.

So it’s a question that has to be solved by industry, you think?
The industry, the governments and the users have to come together and maybe develop something from scratch. It’s time to consider the end at the beginning. Like you design computers and cars with the end of life in mind, when you set out to draw a new boat you (need to) consider materials it is being built from, how long it’s going to be in use. And that’s probably the upside of fiberglass, because fiberglass boats last forever. One of my sources in the book said it quite succinctly: the problem of new boats are the old ones. They won’t go away.

Do we need to maybe start going back to wood or looking at other materials than fiberglass, that are biodegradable?
It would be great if we could go back to wooden boats and produce them en masse and affordably, but that’s just not the case. Can we source enough wood sustainably? Well, we’d probably never get in a position to try, because manual labor is going to be way too expensive to make this process viable.

I’m not advocating to go back to the days of cotton sails and coarsely hewed wooden boats. That’s a specialty of the market that should be there as a traditional aspect of boating, and we can learn a lot from them. But in order to keep sailing viable and prospering, we need to have modern and sustainable ways of producing fast, fun and lasting boats.

And when they reach the end of their life cycle, they need to have a place to go. Whatever that place is going to be, I think the market is going to find out, and it will have to be something that is sustainable not just for the environment but also for the economy. Unfortunately, there’s always the motive of profit, but that’s the system that we live in.

What are the main things sailors do that are not good for the environment, in terms of their own behaviors?
When I say start to consider the end at the beginning, that applies to your shopping for groceries, how you equip your boat, how much energy you need to create to keep your gadgets running. How do you get the energy? Do you only get it from plugging in at the dock? Can you manufacture your own kilowatt hours by utilizing renewable energy, like solar and wind? And maybe it means cutting back on the gadgetry and the appliances that you put on the boat. It’s a little bit counterculture right now to claim that less is more, because if you look at how complex and how comfortable boats are getting, that certainly is not a part of the equation yet.

Has the increased complexity of sailboats made them less environmentally friendly?
As a sailor, you always have the chance to use wind and solar, at least to partially cover your energy household. (There are) circumnavigators who have done it for a long time, like Captain Fatty Goodlander. He has made a point to say, ‘I don’t use refrigeration and I use my engine very sparingly.’ For a while he didn’t have an engine. And he gets all of his electricity needs, according to his own assertion, from renewable energy.

So yes, it can be done. But it will require a lifestyle change and a reevaluation of how you sail and why you sail. Once the environment is degraded, it’s very hard to claim that profits are going to fix it. The prudent way to go about this, I think, is to avoid polluting in the first place and not encounter the horrendous clean-up costs that come due eventually.

People pump raw sewage overboard because there are no pumpout stations in a lot of the pristine cruising grounds. So it’s not just the end user that’s the culprit, but there’s also got to be the infrastructure. That takes taxes. That takes political goodwill. It takes a lot of elements. But it can be done.

Are stricter environmental regulations needed to make sailing more environmentally friendly?
I think you can do it with regulations and government mandate, but there should be enough incentive to keep the environment pristine. That’s why we go sailing. You don’t want to go sailing in polluted areas. I’ve had personal experience with sewage and with fuel spills on the ocean, and it’s not pleasant. So if we consider the environment as part of our mission to go sailing, then we will have a very good reason to consider sustainable methods that help us become better stewards of the environment that we claim to love.

How does the design of a sailboat factor into its environmental impact?
Small is beautiful. If you look at LEED certification for buildings, they always tell you to build on a small footprint and make it energy efficient so you reduce your liability in terms of carbon output, but also the cost of getting energy to heat and cool the place.

With a sailboat it’s very similar. If you like a sailboat to go fast, you probably should not make it heavy, and if you overload it with gadgetry and appliances, you also have to take care of the energy household. You have to add a genset, and you have to worry about the fuel that the genset consumes. So it’s a chain reaction. You can nip it in the bud by keeping it simple and fun and yet still have what’s necessary to keep sailing safely and with great pleasure.

I always go back to my early cruising days on my father’s catamaran, which was very simple. It was a different lifestyle than what we had at home, and that’s how we wanted it. If I wanted to live like in an apartment or a house, then I go live in an apartment or a house. I don’t want to replicate that same lifestyle on a boat. These days, it seems to be pretty common that the industry’s using that as a sales argument: ‘We can replicate your onshore experience very closely. You can have all the comforts and conveniences of home on your boat.’ To me, that would be kind of boring.

How do propulsion and fuel factor into the equation?
To make boats move through the water, you need a lot of energy. And the way you pack energy is to put a gas tank in. That is unfortunately still the most efficient way to bring a lot of energy. So if you have an efficient boat that goes through the water easily and you burn two gallons an hour versus 20 gallons per hour, there’s a lot of efficiency to be gained by design and by keeping the boat efficient for its original purpose.

It also has to do with the size of the engine. If you have a heavy boat you need a lot more horsepower. And a bigger engine consumes more gasoline. So there again you have a chain reaction that you have with electricity and with a lot of other energy needs.

Alternative energy is making inroads. Electricity is getting better. Batteries are getting better. Hybrid drives are for now a solution that is viable in certain cases but certainly not in all cases. So it will have to be evaluated for each application. I see fuel cells becoming much more affordable in the last few years. For generating electricity without having to run a diesel fuel generator and do it quietly and do it reliably, I think that’s going to be an application where we see some progress in the next couple of years.

Do you have any advice for recycling on a sailboat?
If you don’t produce it, you don’t have to trash it and you don’t have to recycle it. Again, consider the end at the beginning. When you go to the grocery store, are you going to bring your own bags or not? I think consideration for the environment starts when you shop, packaging of course being a major problem.

I think the key would be to try to use something very simply and more than once. Start with that. How many times can I use this item? Buy fresh and containerize. Try to avoid plastic packaging. Try to avoid plastic bottling as much as you can, and it’s possible if you can consider it at the beginning. There are charter boats that have started to use water fountains, so you get cold water without the packaging. You can address a lot of issues by changing your system without changing the convenience.

What are some things sailors can do to be more environmentally friendly?
Start at the grocery aisle. In my household, we’ve noticed a big drop-off in packaging garbage by buying in bulk and putting it in reusable plastic containers. You wash them out and you take them back to the grocery store. Put some canvas bags in your car so you don’t forget them. Try to be conscientious about how you drive to the marina. If you can carpool with your buddies, that’s wonderful. And don’t do it when a gallon of gasoline costs five bucks. Do it as a habit.

Look into new technology. I have hope that the new bottom paints can bring relief in high-traffic areas where you have a lot of pleasureboats. Ask for those things when you go to your chandlery or marine outfitter. See if there’s anything that’s affordable. You have to ask for it. If it’s not there and enough people ask for it, they will produce it.

How did you research your book?
My accent betrays my heritage (Loibner is a native of Austria). I still dabble in the European scene and in Europe, raw materials and resources are much scarcer. There’s more people and less space, so they have to find solutions to a lot of problems that we are discussing in this book—how to store boats, how to care for boats, a gallon of gas being six, seven eight dollars in some places will teach you how to be conscientious about your fuel consumption.

Did having a child make you think more about this?
Bless her heart, she’ll be footing the bill for my sins. That’s the nature of the beast. What we do today, good or bad, the bill for that comes due in a couple of generations. We have a responsibility to educate our kids and show them alternatives. Lead by example. There is definitely a concern about the children, to give them the tools to deal with what we leave them. I’m very hopeful. It’s going to take a lot of work but it starts with awareness, and I think people are much more aware of the consequences of what we’re doing.

Does this require a real fundamental mind shift among sailors, or are a lot of sailors there already?
Some are, some aren’t. A sailor is probably one of the best people to think of the solutions or be part of the solution. I’m always humbled when I encounter marine life in its purest form. One of the most exciting moments in my sailing career was a moment off Cape Cod when we got caught in a feeding frenzy of humpback whales that were migrating through the area. You’ve never felt more humble and smaller and unimportant than in the presence of a 40-foot whale diving under your boat. With the flick of a tail, you’d be gone.

If we relate that to our fellow sailors and can tell our kids about the magnificence of marine life, then I think there is definitely hope that we can turn this around and that sailors will utilize their experience to teach and enlighten others.