It wasn’t all that long ago that Clark Foam and its founder, surf pioneer Grubby Clark, finally surrendered in a long-running battle with the EPA and shuttered its doors in a hail of bad words, pronouncements that the end of surfing was upon us, accusations of big government interference and surfboard blanks piled out back of Grubby’s SoCal factory.
The event, however, seemed to be a tipping point that started an eco-wave in the surfing world and led to a new, greener way of making surfboards. The use of a new soy-based material called Biofoam (developed by HomeBlown US) is slowly becoming more prevalent, as well as more accepted. In place of fiberglass cloth, woven bamboo and industrial hemp are being used; bamboo is being used to construct fins as well.
And while they’re just as light and strong as their space-age counterparts, new, more environmentally friendly boards face two main challenges. The first is being accepted by the surfing community at large. Although they have the reputation of being free-thinking, outside the mainstream sorts, surfers can be a very traditional and conservative lot. Mention words like “new” in relation to surfboards, and they tend to avoid it and stay with what they know.
The second challenge is one of cost. At the moment, an all-natural soy resin core and hemp-weave board costs about 50 to 75 percent more than the traditional polyurethane foam and fiberglass model. And, when it comes to costs, surfers are a cheap bunch. Their whole existence revolves around a lifestyle where possessions are few and far between. The most expensive, and cherished, of those possessions is the board; keeping the cost of that down is always a concern. This will of course change over time as economies of scale and acceptance drive the cost down, but still, that’s a major hurdle.
But there’s hope that greener boards could catch a wave of popularity: Surfers can be near-militant environmentalists. When a recent toll road project was proposed for the famous Southern California surf spot known as Trestles, droves of surfers descended on a state public hearing to argue the case against the project, which would have had negative environmental effects.
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