Sound surfing

Cool surfers are out to green their sport. Hannah Bullock takes to the waves.

At one with the ocean, harnessing the waves - surfing might seem at first glance to be as green as it is cool. Until you stop to think of the impact of half a million UK surfers not just riding the waves, but jumping in the car to find that perfect break - or in a plane for something warmer. And paddling out, when they get there, on a board made of petrochemicals.

The way surfboards are made is one of the most tangible contradictions in the sport. It’s no minor detail, either: surf pros get through 30-40 of them a year, and they can take hundreds of years to break down. Alex Dick-Read, editor of green-tinged magazine The Surfer’s Path sums it up nicely: “In theory, we’re very close to nature, submerged in the water, sensing it, smelling it, getting mashed by it. It’s ridiculous that we’re using such toxic tools to do it.”

Yet there are individuals out there on a quest for a sounder surfing industry. One contribution which really caught Dick-Read’s imagination is the ‘eco-board’ initiative at the Eden Project, winner of joint first prize in his magazine’s Green Wave Awards. Eden’s Chris Hines, an avid surfer himself, is determined to show that there are alternatives to ‘toxic’ surfing, and to one day come up with a 100% natural, fully biodegradable board. Like Polynesian surfers centuries ago, he’s opted for a balsawood base, rather than injecting a mould with petrochemical-based foam. He and a group of local Cornish shapers have then covered the wood - grown in Eden’s own famous Biomes - with hemp and an outer shell containing plant-based resin, so using much less of the polyester and fiberglass that conventional shapers rely on.

So why isn’t everyone making them like this? They’re “nowhere near commercial”, says Hines candidly. The few solid wooden models they’ve produced are much too heavy to ride and cost about five times the usual price to make. Local shapers have also had concerns at just how labour-intensive the resin is to apply. But Hines says it’s very much work in progress; he’s currently experimenting with moulding a lighter board of vegetable-starch-based foam, well aware that “with any sustainable product, you’ve got to be able to make it as near as damn cheap and still deliver equal or better quality”.

There’s the rub, says board shaper Andy James. “Serious surfers want a really strong, light board. They’re pushing the limits all the time out there and don’t want to be held back by their equipment.” Just as ethical coffee, clothes or investments has to taste good, look good, perform well, so must ‘cutting edge’ sports techology. As with cars, so with surfboards: green machines must still be mean machines.

One company thinks it might almost have solved the conundrum, even if it is just a one-man outfit in Cornwall. Ocean Green is tackling the weight issue by making hollow balsa boards - which are actually on the market, selling for only a third more than conventional ones. While these boards aren’t 100% biodegradable, being stuck together with glue, shaper Stuart Hampson points out that they use less wood than Eden’s. Plus, the balsa is shaped by a fairtrade community in Nicaragua (something positive to set against those air miles) and the hemp cloth is organically grown.

You might wonder if this tinkering with surfboard manufacturing is even worth it, with surfers totting up all those miles getting to the beach in the first place. James was in two minds at first... “but then I realised that the surf board is so iconic - and if we can get that right, then maybe we can inspire people to get the rest of the sport right”.

That’s what Surfers Against Sewage is trying to do. Originally set up to protest against the sewage being pumped out into three particular bays in Cornwall (by the same Chris Hines back in 1990), the NGO is now encouraging its 8,000 members to face up to issues like climate change. “If the sea level rises, we’ll say goodbye to some of our surfing beaches in Britain,” says a realistic Richard Hardy, campaigns director. Incidentally, this led them to question their (unfounded) concern that wave farms would reduce the power of the waves by the time they reached the shore, and to change their stance on marine power. They recently gave their support to the Wave Hub marine power farm, with which they’ll be sharing the Cornish waters from next year.

While their war cry to legislators is to clean up the water, their message to surfers is to stay and surf the waves on our “fantastic island”, share lifts to the coast (particularly for those ‘beached’ surfers living in central England), or if they have to travel, offset their emissions.

Hines himself has visions of funky ‘offset’ t-shirts with surfwear giant O’Neill’s branding on... And he’s thinking bigger of course: “We want to use surfing’s image to bring wider changes in manufacturing. After all, it’s not as easy to inspire change with widgets.”

The green wave needn’t be just a surfer’s dream, then...

Toxic shock wave Clark Foam, the California-based factory that produced about 90% of the boards shaped worldwide, was closed down last year over controversy surrounding toxic chemicals affecting employees and the local environment. Founder Gordon Clark saw it as the end of an era for the conventional foam manufacturing method he co-invented: “I continued merrily along assuming this was the way things worked... I waited far too long, being optimistic rather than realistic. I also failed to do my homework.”

7 July 2006

Hannah Bullock