Copper. The reddish metal that you may remember from the periodic chart has kept a vigilant presence in boating since the 18th century when the British Royal Navy adhered copper plates to their hulls to protect them from shipworms and other marine growth. Copper has worked so well that it remains in most of the bottom paint you will find on store shelves.
Copper, like tributyl tin (which was phased out in 1988) and zinc, is known as a biocide. “Bio” means “life” and “cide” means “killing.” Copper may be a victim of its own success. While it’s great at killing life on your hull, paint can leach into its environment.
“Even in extremely small concentrations, copper is a dangerous pollutant for marine life, especially our salmon. In many cases, it’s even more toxic than lead,” said Chris Wilke, executive director of the Puget Soundkeeper Alliance. He’s been looking at this issue for years and came to the same conclusion that Northwest Marine Trade Association arrived at in 2011 — that copper should be phased out of paint.
A 2007 study from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration found that copper disrupts a young salmon’s ability to smell. According to the study, salmon swimming through dissolved copper lose the ability to smell their prey. Salmon also use their sense of smell to locate food, find their home stream, and reproduce.
“If we know that copper is bad, and if we know that boatyards are continually struggling to make the benchmarks in their boatyard permit, why not try an approach that addresses the pollutant at its source? For us, that was looking at the paint in the can and not copper at the end of the pipe,” said Jim Brown, chair of the Clean Boating Foundation board and one of the original core members of the group that put forward legislation to phase out copper-bottom paint.
Read the full post on the Clean Boating Foundation.
The post King Copper Is Dead: A big change in boating is coming, are you ready? appeared first on YachtAweigh.
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