A Cover Story

Used to cover recreational boats, shrink wrap is a single-use plastic that’s posing problems for the environment.

Photo of three 25 foot boats wrapped in white shrink wrap. Image taken from the ground. The boats are on the top level of an outdoor dry dock facility, or boatel.

Scores of species mark the arrival of spring in Maryland—ospreys returning to nests, turtles emerging from muddy winter beds, baseball fans making a beeline for Camden Yards, boaters getting back on the Chesapeake Bay. All of them shake off winter in one way or another, but boats in particular present an environmental conundrum when the plastic shrink wrap that’s been used to protect them from the cold-weather elements is removed. Made of #4 linear low-density polyethylene (LDPE), marine shrink wrap is a non-biodegradable, heavy-duty plastic that’s heat-shrunk onto a framework of woven polyester or nylon strapping, sealing tightly and allowing snow and ice to slide off. (LDPE is what most trash bags are made of; shrink wrap is just a much heavier version of it.) Typically, it’s used once, then cut off the boat in spring and thrown away; as such, it’s as much a single-use plastic as water bottles, cutlery, or straws.

Image of two shrink wrapped boats on the top level of an outdoor dry dock facility.
Image of two shrink wrapped boats on the top level of an outdoor dry dock facility.

Shrink-wrapped power boats stored in a “boatel” in Ocean City, Maryland.

And, while tons of it are generated in Maryland and nationally—the vast majority ending up in landfills or incinerators—efforts toward recycling and changing boat owners’ behavior around using it are complicated by a dearth of research and firm data, the volatile global economics of recycling, limited alternatives for boaters and lack of knowledge about those that exist, and the basic physical difficulties of handling the material.

“With shrink wrap, I think one of the biggest challenges is there is no silver bullet,” for dealing with it after use, says Alanna Keating, director of outreach for BoatUS Foundation, the nonprofit arm of BoatUS, a national recreational boating advocacy and service organization with 700,000 members. “There’s no single solution that works everywhere for everybody…it’s something that has to be tackled from all sorts of different angles.”

 NOAA’s 2021 Mid-Atlantic Marine Debris Action Plan  includes a section focusing on shrink wrap, abandoned derelict boats, and fiberglass, including a goal by the end of 2026 “to partner with at least three recycling centers to understand issues and opportunities to increase sustainable disposal alternatives for shrink wrap.” “Once plastic materials enter the coastal and marine environment, they can break up into microplastics and may never fully go away,” says Katie Morgan, Mid-Atlantic regional coordinator of the NOAA Marine Debris Program. “That’s why preventing items, such as shrink wrap, from entering the environment in the first place is especially important.” But anyone working on the issue will tell you that its complexity stymies these efforts, a factor noted by four Marine Estuarine Environmental Sciences (MEES) graduate students—Marshall Grossman, Yang Yu, Andrea Pfaff, and Daniella Hanacek. They examined shrink wrap use and recycling in a fall 2021 University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science (UMCES) issue study group class led by Chesapeake Biological Laboratory Research Professor Helen Bailey and Professor Carys Mitchelmore.

“The fact that little to no databasing or standardization between states exists, suggests a need for a cohesive country-wide effort on the boat shrink wrap recycling program,” the students wrote in their final presentation. “The Maryland DNR [Department of Natural Resources], and similar natural resources departments around the country, would benefit from understanding how other industries have handled LDPE#4 recycling and reuse.”

Calculating the Problem

Like many issues surrounding plastics, quantifying the scope of the problem is problematic. Difficulties arise as soon as you start trying to nail down questions as seemingly simple as: How many boats in Maryland are shrink wrapped annually, and how many pounds of shrink wrap do they generate? Most are wrapped either by the boatyards and marinas where they spend the winter, or by subcontractors—although do-it-yourselfers also wrap their boats in backyards or driveways. Boats of all sizes and types can be shrink wrapped, from 20-foot runabouts to 50-foot-plus sail and powerboats, so estimating is the only way to begin to approach quantification.

One reason quantifying shrink wrap use is so difficult is because of the variety of boat shapes and sizes. Photos, MDSG

The MEES students used results from an August 2020 DNR survey of Maryland boaters that found that 37% shrink wrapped their boats. They applied that to the total number of boats registered in the state—169,902—to come up with 62,863 boats using shrink wrap. They then took the low end of Woods Hole Sea Grant’s working estimate of 15–25 pounds of shrink wrap per boat to come up with a total of 942,956 pounds—471.5 tons—of wrap used annually in the state.

Graphic showing how MEES students estimated how many pounds of shrink wrap is used in Maryland annually.

The Maryland Trades Association of Maryland (MTAM) surveyed some large marinas who reported that about 25% of boats are shrink wrapped. They assumed that boats over 20 feet are the ones using shrink wrap, and estimating 75,000 boats greater than 20 feet in the state, the group applied 25% to 75,000 to develop an estimate of 18,750 boats being shrink wrapped, each boat averaging about 25 pounds of wrap, resulting in at least 468,750 pounds—234 tons—used annually.

Graphic showing how MTAM estimated how many pounds of shrink wrap is used in Maryland annually.

“These are all assumptions,” acknowledges Susan Zellers, outgoing executive director of the MTAM, who has been working on the shrink wrap issue for 20-plus years. “There’s no question that we’re producing a tremendous amount of plastic, whether these numbers are correct or not.” On a national level, the Rhode Island-based nonprofit Clean Ocean Access (COA), which is working to generate statistical data from which to develop sustainable shrink wrap recycling strategies, has estimated shrink wrap density based on registered boats in states with an average winter temperature below 32°F where they are likely to be wrapped (Maryland isn’t one of them). Among their findings, if half of the boats registered in those states use shrink wrap, that comes to 3.1 million boats. For “medium weight per boat” of 30 pounds of wrap, that translates to 92.8 million pounds, or 46,373 tons of shrink wrap. The group also included estimates for “low weight per boat” using 15 pounds—23,198 tons—and “high weight per boat” of 40 pounds—61,831 tons.

Graphic showing how COA estimated how many pounds of shrink wrap the United States uses annually.

“You have to do the research to understand what the best move is, and that’s exactly what we’re trying to do, and we welcome more people to help us with it,” says Max Kraimer, COA’s strategic partnerships manager. “What we’ve started to do with this data is work with the [state motor vehicle agencies] and get their boat registration data to look at the linear feet of the boats that are registered, so we can more specifically break that down.”

How does plastic from one boat measure up?

Shrink wrap from one 25-foot boat

Illustration of a person standing by a shrink wrapped boat that is approximately 25 feet in length.

is approximately equal to ...

2,062 illustrated plastic shopping bags

2,062 plastic shopping bags

(assuming each bag weighs 0.2 ounces and the boat uses 25 pounds of plastic)

Recycling: The Rub

One fact everyone can agree on is that not enough shrink wrap is recycled, and too much ends up in landfills or incinerators. But even that is more complex than it sounds, since the recycling process is far from consistent or ideal, and the market for recycled plastics has changed drastically in the past 10 years. “Why isn’t more material being recycled? It really comes down to economics,” Dylan Layfield, director of freight recycling at TerraCycle, said at COA’s March 2022 Shrink Wrap Summit webinar. TerraCycle, a New Jersey-based recycler, has partnered with COA in a shrink wrap recycling program in New England that, since it began in 2019, has collected and recycled 335,274 pounds of wrap into post-consumer resin.

Layfield noted that “40% of end markets have stopped accepting plastics from recyclers…With China and India and other countries shutting down and not accepting our plastic and our waste, it has really shown…that we are not set up domestically to handle this material. The good news is we are realizing how domestic markets are important. So I think we’re going to start seeing more processors, more end users, and ultimately more recyclers pop up. But it still is a big problem.” He added that recyclers have been getting less money for mixed plastics, though the market has rebounded slightly in the past two years for plastic films like shrink wrap. “There can be some value for clean film, but from five to ten years ago, the value we’re getting from recycling is just far less than it used to be.”

Graphic titled "Prices of plastic film destined for export have begun to go negative: Monthly price range per tonne for each level of contamination" Graphic shows 2%, 5%, 10%, and 20% contamination prices from 2015–2019, highlighting when China stopped waste plastic imports in January 2018.

The BBC developed this graphic to show the trajectory of prices of film in the UK. The US market has seen the same dramatic drop (1 metric tonne is approximately equal to 1.1 US tons).

“It’s deceptively complicated,” says Stephanie Murphy, who manages the shrink wrap recycling program at Woods Hole Sea Grant in Massachusetts. The program began about six years ago with a single container at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and, in collaboration with Barnstable County, has expanded to five locations across Cape Cod. Last year it collected 20,000 pounds of wrap. “I think people are so used to being able to put their stuff in a recycling bin and that’s the end of it, and they don’t have to think about it. But when you try to start a program, you get involved in every element of this waste management world, and you have to think about where it’s going once it leaves your hands.” Maryland has been recycling shrink wrap “in one fashion or another” for about 20 years, Zellers says, but market vagaries contributed to inconsistency. In 2019, however, MTAM adopted a model from the Rhode Island Marine Trades Association. The MTAM buys plastic bags that can hold 40 pounds of wrap and sells them to participating marinas for $15 per bag. That cost covers the expense of a hauler to pick up the bags and take them to a facility to bale them—consolidate them into a denser block of material—into a quantity sufficient to be sold on the recycling market.

A designated dumpster at Herrington Harbour North in Tracys Landing, Maryland, holds bags of recycled shrink wrap taken off customers’ boats. Photos, MDSG

Zellers says 30 boatyards and marinas are participating so far, and recycling numbers have slowly grown, from 30,000 pounds in 2019 to about 50,000 pounds in 2021. Using the MEES report estimate of 942,956 pounds used annually, that’s a recycling rate of 5.3%. (Statewide in 2020, plastic comprised only 3% of recycled materials in Maryland, according to the Maryland Department of the Environment, despite an overall statewide recycling rate of 38.2%.)

Marinas participating in the MTAM shrink wrap recycling program. Above are marinas that ordered recycling bags in 2021 (red), 2022 (yellow), or in 2021 and 2022 (orange).

“We’ve really pushed and publicized the program so people are aware it’s available,” says Hamilton Chaney, owner and operator of Herrington Harbour North in Tracys Landing, Maryland, where about 250 boats are shrink wrapped annually. “In 2019 we recycled one ton of shrink wrap, in 2020 we recycled two tons, and in 2021 we did three tons. Our goal this year is to get around four tons, which would be pretty much everything on the property.”

Chaney says one bag can take wrap from a boat up to 35 feet, two bags for 35 to 50 feet, and three bags for 50 and over. In his marina, the contractor who wrapped the boat in fall typically is removing it in spring and placing it into the bags, then into a 30-yard dumpster delivered specifically to hold the bagged wrap until pickup. Sounds simple, right? It is anything but. First, the wrap must be thoroughly “cleaned” of any of the polyester or nylon strapping that anchored it around the boat, as well as any vents, zippers, buckles, or doors installed to provide access and ventilation. These non-LDPE materials can damage recycling equipment and contaminate the recycled resin, making it less valuable.

Photo of shrink wrapped boat with tape, vents, and doors highlighted.

Counterclockwise from left: Nylon or polypropylene tape, vents to provide air flow, and doors to provide access are among the components of a shrink wrap installation that are considered contaminants and must be removed before the LDPE can be recycled.

Cleaning the wrap is far more time consuming than just cutting it off a boat, and most boatyards are too busy during spring to dedicate employees to it. Once off the boat, it must be tightly rolled to fit the maximum amount in the bags. Then the bags have to be stored (most marinas don’t have a dedicated dumpster) until they have enough to be picked up by a hauler. In cases where boat owners do the work, often marina employees have to follow up, rerolling the wrap more tightly or removing strapping that was left.

“Nobody likes it,” Zellers says. “It’s just not part of the day. It’s a pain.”

This timelapse video shows how shrink wrap is removed to be recycled.

Sarah Orlando, the Clean Marinas Program manager for Ohio Sea Grant under which the state’s shrink wrap recycling is run in partnership with the Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR) Office of Coastal Management and the ODNR Division of Parks and Watercraft, says they’ve had recyclers who’ve backed out of the program after contaminated wrap damaged their equipment. At its peak in 2009, the Ohio program was working with a recycler who took care of all of the logistics after the wrap left the marina; that year alone, the state recycled 365,000 pounds of wrap from boats (plus another 40,000 from greenhouses, which use the same material for hoop houses).

Then in 2012, the recycler said it was no longer cost-effective to provide the logistics free of charge.

“They could get raw plastic pellets cheaper than the cost of gas and labor to pick up shrink wrap,” Orlando says. The program shrank from 125 participants to 30 in 2014. Today, the program is rebuilding using a network of collaborators, recycling about 34,000 pounds a year.

Mark Goodman, CEO of Chesapeake Materials, who has partnered with MTAM to provide the “roll-off” dumpsters to some of Maryland’s participating marinas and gets the wrap baled and sold, says that storing the wrap and coordinating its pickup is a major logistical hurdle.

“It’s expensive, nobody wants to keep it at their marinas very long. It’s the reason why it’s a problem really,” he says. “Everybody likes the idea of recycling, but when it comes down to it, somehow you have to consolidate this stuff.”

Graphic showing the lifecycle of marine shrink wrap.

A 52-foot trailer could fill up with about 7,000 pounds of bags, but that trailer can handle a load of 42,000 pounds, says Kevin Cronin, vice president of sustainability and R&D for Ultra-Poly, a Pennsylvania-based plastics recycler that is entering the shrink wrap market. Bales of shrink wrap, on the other hand, weigh 14,000 to 16,000 pounds each.

“What’s critical to making these programs work is baling it, densifying it, so I can get a full trailer load,” Cronin says. Like most plastics, shrink wrap is “a few-to-many-distribution channel. There are maybe five companies that make boat wrap. There are hundreds of marinas, with thousands of boats. Once it gets as dispersed as that, it becomes hard to reconsolidate it, and reconsolidation is key.”

In Ohio, Orlando has helped pull together a coalition of what she calls her “champions” that includes marinas, the Toledo chapter of Keep Ohio Beautiful, Cleveland Metroparks, the Muskingum Watershed Conservancy District, Mindful Mariners, LLC, and even the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo, which has helped coordinate a shrink wrap drop-off day.

“The main thing I have learned is that we cannot rely on a single person and this cannot be free. We’re not going to get everybody involved, but if you find the right people and develop the right partnerships, you can put it together to do the right thing,” Orlando says, adding that contamination and transport remain the biggest challenges. “If either one of those barriers were removed, it would drastically increase participation.”

Making Recycling Work

Though complicated and imperfect, recycling can work. Ohio’s efforts since 2006 have resulted in 2.3 million pounds of shrink wrap being recycled, 1.9 million pounds of it from boats. Much of it became plastic blocks that support highway guardrails—nearly 340,000 blocks over 422 miles that the program equates to 48.6 buses’ worth of landfill space.

In Michigan, the shrink wrap manufacturer Dr. Shrink has promoted recycling for 20 years; since 2020, the company has worked with the Michigan Recycling Coalition and Bay Area Recycling for Charities to broaden recycling (it’s also now working with COA’s efforts in New England). As part of Michigan’s “Recycling Run” program, Dr. Shrink sells “EZ-Fill Bags” that can hold a cover from up to a 32-foot boat (850 square feet of plastic) for $7 to marinas, which covers the costs of hauling; individual boat owners also can buy the bags directly and are provided with drop-off locations. Boaters and marinas must register to participate in the program.

“We take all the registrations and we coordinate routes with all these addresses,” says Katie Fournier, Michigan Recycling Coalition’s project coordinator. “They pick it up, bale it, and then sell it. Our primary end market is Trex decking, where this is turned into composite decks.” They expect to recycle 70,000 pounds this year, she says. “We’re scratching the surface, and yet this is a huge amount of plastic to recover from landfills already.”

Trex’s annual report notes that it diverted 362 million pounds of recycled polyethylene film from landfills in 2020, though the report does not break out numbers for types of film.

“Marine shrink wrap is an exploratory stream for Trex,” Kellie Driscoll, development representative for recycling, said in an email, adding that the company has no data on how much shrink wrap it has used in its decking.

Another Way to Cover

What about just not using shrink wrap at all?

Screenshot of MTAM's "Think Before You Shrink" poster.

 Think Before You Shrink  campaign poster

That’s an approach that Donna Morrow, program manager of Maryland DNR’s Chesapeake and Coastal Services, who also runs the state’s Clean Marinas Program, is pursuing with a public education campaign begun in 2021 called Think Before You Shrink. Using videos, social media, and posters that marinas and boat clubs can display, the campaign encourages boaters to use reusable, fitted boat covers rather than shrink wrap.

Morrow conducted a 2020 survey of Maryland boaters to help inform the Think Before You Shrink campaign. In that survey, 76% of respondents said they didn’t realize that recycled Maryland shrink wrap has typically gone overseas. Most (37%) also cited cost as the reason they don’t use a reusable fitted cover, and 52% said they would consider switching if the fitted cover’s cost was comparable to shrink wrap within three to five years.

“We’re never going to get 100%, that’s not the goal,” Morrow says. “But I’d like to see 30% stop doing it if they don’t need it.”

Fitted covers run the gamut; a cover for a 22-foot runabout can be purchased online for between $200 and $500, depending on the choice of fabric, and can last at least five years. A fully custom cover made from a material like Top Gun can cost up to $150 or more a foot, depending on complexity, says Sean Lawlor, owner of Cover Loft in Annapolis. These can last more than a decade if well cared for. (It’s worth noting that most of the materials from which these fitted covers are made are not traditional marine canvas cloth, but rather high-tech fabrics optimized to resist stretch, condensation, mold, and UV. Top Gun, for example, is an acrylic-coated woven polyester, while a fabric like Sunbrella is also acrylic.)

Alternatives to shrink wrap can include fully custom covers, such as the one on the sailboat shown in the upper left, to off-the-shelf covers that can fit a range of boat sizes and shapes.

Shrink wrapping a boat averages about $20 a foot, says Scott Tinkler, vice president and general manager of Port Annapolis Marina, along with Herrington Harbour one of Maryland’s biggest wrap recyclers. But since shrink wrap is made from natural gas, the cost varies, and in 2021 material costs nearly doubled; he hopes that may improve the break-even point for people who are considering switching to reusable covers.

“It’s just so bad for the environment, to me it’s not a great solution,” Tinkler says. “We try to push people into getting a winter cover that’s more permanent.”

“Shrink wrap is getting more expensive every year,” Lawlor agrees. “A winter cover is definitely more expensive initially, but generally they pay for themselves after about five years.”

Morrow says she doesn’t have the resources to analyze whether Think Before You Shrink is making a difference, but Chaney says at his marina, coupled with a strong push toward recycling, “We have seen a solid increase in canvas covers being used.”

Another alternative is for boat owners to reuse their shrink wrap. This, too, requires some effort, since they must remove it carefully and store it. And, on subsequent use, it’s more difficult—and frequently not possible—to heat shrink it completely again, so instead it basically becomes a large tarp.

The best option for the environment is no cover at all, but that’s likely only going to be accepted by boat owners in milder climates.

In Search of a Circular Economy

Many people wrestling with the shrink wrap conundrum believe another part of the solution lies—as with other plastics—in producers taking more responsibility, rather than just consumers, and working toward a circular economy that would, ideally, use recycled shrink wrap to make more shrink wrap.

“What we’d like to see happen is if we can take that plastic and make it into shrink wrap again and use it domestically instead of selling it to Bangladesh, which was the only place that would take it,” MTAM’s Zellers says.

Dave McLaughlin, COA’s co-founder and program director, said at the Shrink Wrap Summit that “there’s already been a small proof of concept that the [recycled] pellets can be used to create plastic film that could be used to wrap the boats.” But the economies of scale for shrink wrap producers to create post-consumer film from recycled wrap don’t exist yet. “It’s near and dear to our hearts, but it’s a pretty big step, and we’re still working on building this network of momentum.”

Ultra-Poly’s Cronin says it’s a tough nut to crack because the process of making plastic film, even for something like a garbage bag, is technically demanding, and even a tiny amount of contamination in the recycled material can sabotage the end result.

“That’s why it’s hard to get this stuff back into another stretch film,” he says. “It is valuable as a compounding agent for other things. We do not generally sell it back into the film industry.”

Graphic highlighting various items that cane be produced from recycled LDPE, including compost bins, floor tile, furniture, garbage can liners, landscape timber, outdoor lumber, paneling, shipping envelopes, and trash cans

To help inform a circular economy model and management decisions, MEES students Grossman, Yu, Pfaff, and Hanacek concluded that Maryland should undertake a life cycle assessment (LCA) of recycling marine shrink wrap. Such assessments typically attempt to quantify the environmental impacts over the course of a product’s life—in the case of shrink wrap, the effects of carbon emissions from transportation and processing for recycling, for example.

Noting that, “The scale of boat shrink wrap recycling programs is small enough to prevent there being substantial published research on the topic,” they looked toward research around LDPE in some agriculture applications.

They cited a 2020 paper published in the Journal of Environmental Management on an LCA “of energy and water consumption and greenhouse gas emissions to understand the environmental impact of mechanical recycling of agricultural wastes” for one Italian recycling firm. “That study found that the electricity required to recycle the material was the major energy and environmental issue of this system. However, they also report that the LCA for the recycled material was much more sustainable than the virgin plastic counterpart.”

“The authors note that their results are necessary for European leaders to put forward appropriate measures to accomplish European Commission directives towards a more efficient economy,” the students said. “This suggests that one need for the Maryland DNR managers is to perform an LCA on this plastic locally to guide future waste management decisions.”

The students also cited a 2020 study published in the Journal of Cleaner Production that compared the suitability of recycled and virgin LDPE as tube shelters for plant seedlings. “They found that the performance of virgin versus used LDPE was similar, providing a promising potential future use for recycled LDPE.”

Potential parallel uses of LDPE in agriculture could help build Maryland’s marine shrink wrap recycling efforts, the students concluded. (Recall the Ohio program’s collaboration with the garden industry’s hoop houses.) Thus far, however, DNR’s Morrow says she has had no response from her efforts to connect with the Maryland Farm Bureau on the topic.

(Interestingly, Krisztina Christmon, an entomology PhD student in UMD’s College of Agriculture and Natural Resources (AGNR) has developed a “plasticulture” recycling company with a concept that stemmed from her winning entry in the AGNR 2020 AgEnterprise Challenge. Repurpose Farm Plastic LLC plans to “mechanically recycle agricultural plastic waste at a local scale” and is developing funding sources and partnerships.)

Clockwise from upper left: Krisztina Christmon is starting a “plasticulture” recycling company on Maryland’s Eastern Shore; examples of plastics being used in agriculture applications include hoop houses, coverings providing weed control while growing strawberries, and protective sheeting for plants.

Regardless of the angle from which the various stakeholders approach the issue of shrink wrap, most feel that boat owners want to make better choices if they’re available and consistent.

“I’m a lifelong area resident and boater and would like the problem solved,” says Goodman of Chesapeake Materials. “I think there’s a way to do it, and we’re in the early stages of getting much broader participation in it…No matter what the plastic market is, it makes sense for this program to go forward and keep it out the landfill.”


For more information about Maryland’s shrink wrap recycling program and Think Before you Shrink program,  contact the Maryland DNR .

Shrink-wrapped power boats stored in a “boatel” in Ocean City, Maryland.

The BBC developed this graphic to show the trajectory of prices of film in the UK. The US market has seen the same dramatic drop (1 metric tonne is approximately equal to 1.1 US tons).

Counterclockwise from left: Nylon or polypropylene tape, vents to provide air flow, and doors to provide access are among the components of a shrink wrap installation that are considered contaminants and must be removed before the LDPE can be recycled.