Made of Kevlar, Mylar or some other synthetic fabric, worn out sails once faced limited choices — an ignominious afterlife as a painter’s dropcloth or a one-way trip to one of Maine’s overflowing landfills or a lonely corner of the attic.
No longer. Up and down the coast of Maine, sail makers, fashion-minded entrepreneurs and solid waste recovery companies have found intriguing ways to give tired sails a second chance at being useful. After years of catching the breeze, worn-out sailcloth is now being reconfigured into chic hand totes, turned into Boy Scout tents or even transformed into electricity.
Several Maine businesses currently compete in the sail cloth-turned-luggage market. Sea Bags, a Portland-based company that currently employs 10 people (as well as a couple of inmates at the Maine Women’s Correctional Center) boasts a cheerful willingness to drive great distances to collect old sails.
Retailing for $75 to $110, Sea Bags totes have garnered rave reviews in the high-fashion world, recently looking quite smart in a New York Times Style Section layout that included a $1,250 Chanel beach bag. While Sea Bags’ owners pride themselves on down-to-earth sensibilities, they work diligently to serve a market of Newport and Los Angeles publicists who, with non-disclose contracts in hand, snatch them up in bulk as party favors. Hannah Kubiak, co-owner of this hot new company, takes great pride in repeating a recycling mantra that’s proving to be as fashionable as it is environmentally friendly: “Sail material didn’t use to enjoy a second life, or a second chance,” smiles Kubiak. “So that’s where Sea Bags comes in.”
Each Sea Bag is designed and hand stitched with decorative touches ranging from stars, stripes and numbers in the colors of red, blue, green, gray, black or day-glow orange and pink; most totes, marketed primarily on the website www.seabags.com, sport a hand-spliced nautical rope handle that is soft yet sturdy. Sailcloth is procured by staff trained to barter (one possibility is a free tote bag), as well as offer to turn an old dust-gathering sailcloth into a tax-deductible donation to the Casco Bay Sailing School’s scholarship fund. At Sea Bags, the gangbuster seller is the red-star bearing tote, yet as a made-in-Maine company deeply committed to quirkiness, Sea Bags deftly dispenses with the occasional fussy customer struggling to comprehend certain virtues inherent in a hand-crafted accessory. “Recently a customer called to say `hey, my star wasn’t centered,’ ” laughs Sea Bags’ co-owner Beth Sissler. “Well, you know what? We’re just not a centered kind of company — it’s not like we’re punching these bags out in a factory in China.”
Yet another sailcloth-turned-tote maker, Liza Nichols, solo owner of Second Wind, based in Pownal, finds her sailcloth by posting notices on yacht club bulletin boards. In contract to Sea Bags, a company priding itself on decorative star-and-number appliqué options, Nichols’s totes are primarily a purist white. Nichols sews each bag herself, her work retails for $35 to $60 in gift shops along Maine’s coast, and every tote bears a tag that waxes rather poetically on the theme of second chances for old sailcloth.
“Handcrafted from genuine sailcloth, this bag in a previous life might have survived round the Horn, ghosted along in Maine’s legendary fog, or spent summers romping in Penobscot Bay to slide on an evening into a tidal creek on a dying breeze,” reads the Second Wind label.
“In the yachting world there’s so much waste,” sighs Nichols. “I just hit on one way to recycle some of this waste.”
Meanwhile, for those Maine companies primarily in the business of fashioning new sails to order, the matter of retired cloth and leftover scraps is secondary to the industry at hand. “Some of my enterprising employees have been known to make bags out of scraps,” says Robe Haile, a sailmaker at Maine Sailing Partners, in Yarmouth. With eight industrial sewing machines worth at least $20,000 apiece, Haile’s customers include racing sailors who replace their sails every year, sometimes after every regatta. “Laminated sails shrink,” explains Haile. “When you crease a laminated sail, it’s like folding a dollar bill. And when they’re no longer useful, either the customers keep their old sails or they donate them to the Sea Bags, Liza Nichols, the Boy Scouts, the American Red Cross or a few marine-related companies that sell them on consignment with the proceeds benefiting non-profits companies.”
Richard Hallet, owner of Hallet Canvas and Sails, in Falmouth, has an exclusive arrangement with Sea Bags, piling them up at the door for steady pick up. “We also donate scrap cloth of Mylar and Dacron to the Falmouth schools for banners, to the Boy Scouts who use them for tents,” says Hallet, adding that he’s been known to sew awnings, woodpile covers and turn spinnakers into a custom fitted car cover.
At Pope Sails, in Rockland, Doug Pope says he encourages staff to turn leftover sailcloth into totes purely “to keep one of my stitchers busy,” and his one-size, keep-it-simple tote retails for $40 at the Island Institute’s shop, Archipelago. In addition, like Bohndell sails in Rockport, Pope tosses his remaining scraps in a dumpster that winds up at the Penobscot Recovery Company (PERC).
And here’s where the second-wind, second-chance tale unwanted sail cloth turns electric — literally Arguably, incineration of non-biodegradable material is preferable to the tossing it into landfill, so when PERC transforms of old sailcloth into electricity, one might consider this a happy ending. “We burn municipal solid waste, which heats water to produce steam that turns a generator that produces electricity,” explains Gary Stacey, PERC plant controller.