Three trade bodies have put a questionnaire in front of the boatbuilding industry and given it until Friday 23 October 2026 to answer. ICOMIA (the International Council of Marine Industry Associations), European Boating Industry (EBI) and the American NMMA (National Marine Manufacturers Association) want to know whether builders, suppliers and the wider industry are ready for one shared method of life cycle assessment for yachts with a hull length under 24 metres — LCA, the accounting that adds up a boat's environmental impact from raw material to the scrapyard. What comes back shapes how the method gets written.
What the survey asks and where the answers go
The form is called the Global Lifecycle Assessment Stakeholder Engagement Project and should take no more than twenty minutes to fill in. The questionnaire asks what a company already knows about LCA, who in the company handles it and what data it holds, what stands in the way, and how it could be helped. Answers stay confidential: published output is aggregated and anonymised, and no company will be named. The last item asks whether you would agree to an interview. The link is open at surveymonkey.com.
Filling it in is also the way into the pilot. Companies that answer may be picked for a group that tests the trial tool from October to December 2026, built on version 1.1 of the Blue Boat Horizon methodology. No other route in has been announced. Everything here covers recreational boats up to 24 metres.
"The success of this project depends on broad industry participation," said Joe Lynch, CEO of ICOMIA. "We want to ensure that our collaboration and the methodology reflect the realities of boatbuilders operating in different markets, building different types of craft, and working at different levels of sustainability maturity."
None of the three associations has published a press release about the survey. This account comes from Marine Industry News, which reported it on 16 September 2026, and from the questionnaire itself.
Blue Boat Horizon: who runs it and what it counts
Blue Boat Horizon is EBI's project, launched in 2024, with the Swiss consultancy Quantis writing the method. More than 21 manufacturers and 11 national associations take part. It follows the EU's Product Environmental Footprint, or PEF — the common European rules for calculating a product's environmental footprint — so a boat's numbers can travel into a European framework. What version 1.1 changes against 1.0 is not known.
The three associations announced their alliance at boot Düsseldorf on 20 January 2025. Robert Marx, president of EBI, said then that his organisation had been building an LCA method for the European market "given some of our members' more immediate needs", and that working with ICOMIA and NMMA "provides a long-term globally aligned solution". Darren Vaux, at the time president of ICOMIA, called a standardised LCA "a consistent path for measurement and self-regulation across our industry". Frank Hugelmeyer took over from him as ICOMIA president on 29 May 2025.
Why boats under 24 metres need a count of their own
Europe holds around six million recreational boats. One to two per cent of them drop out of use every year, at least 80,000 hulls, and 2,000 to 3,000 are properly recycled. About 95 per cent of the fleet is GRP, a material designed without an end-of-life route. EBI has committed to phasing out landfill and incineration by 2030, and by then it expects more than 30,000 boats a year to reach end of life in the EU — over 231,000 tonnes of composite.
The big end of the market got its measuring sticks first. Yacht Club de Monaco started the SEA Index in 2020 for yachts above 25 metres. Water Revolution Foundation released YETI 1.0 for superyachts in November 2022. ICOMIA's own broad study came in November 2023 with the consultancy Ricardo — "Pathways to Propulsion Decarbonisation", nine craft types against five propulsion options out to 2035, with sustainable marine fuel expected to cut emissions by as much as 90 per cent by 2035. Below 24 metres sit almost all yachts, and nearly every boat and craft there is built of composite; that part of the market gets its first common measure now. The questionnaire closes on 23 October 2026.
Photo: EBI / ICOMIA. Source: Marine Industry News (16.09.2026), the Global Lifecycle Assessment Stakeholder Engagement Project survey, European Boating Industry, ICOMIA.
