Shapeshifting – The art of hand-making surfboards
Critical issues 2: Materials and Sustainability
Most surfboards today are foam and fibreglass sandwiches, with a shaped foam core wrapped in several layers of resin-impregnated fibreglass.
Before the late 1950s, all surfboards were made of wood and were quite heavy. The development of polyurethane (PU) foam cores and polyester resin and fibreglass skins in the mid-to-late 1950s, revolutionised the sport. Because foam was so much faster and easier to shape than wood, surfboard design sped up. Working with foam and fibreglass, shapers could be far more spontaneous and creative and move rapidly from design theory to testing to modifying a design, which greatly accelerated the evolution of surfboards. This technological breakthrough led to the modern lightweight surfboard and worldwide popularity and mass demand. An industry evolved to supply shapers with a catalogue of foam blanks – a whole range of foam cores that required little in the way of major shaping.
In time, the foam blank industry became dominated by a single Californian company, Clark Foam, who by 2005 supplied 90% of the world market. But on 5 December, 2005, the owner of the company, Gordon "Grubby" Clark, closed his doors with no prior notice, smashed his moulds, sent 1,000 employees home, and ceased production altogether. In a seven-page fax sent to surfboard companies on the day he closed, Clark cited pressure the US Environmental Protection Agency was bringing to bear over his company's use of the carcinogenic chemical toluene di-isocyanate (TDI) to make its foam.
After an initial period of shock and disbelief, the surfing industry rushed to fill the void. New foam manufacturers sprang up and some existing ones expanded their operations. Others, with an eye to the future, began working on alternative, less toxic PU foam formulations. Some board manufacturers experimented with alternative foams altogether. Unlike nearly all other segments of the sporting goods industry, the use of high-tech materials in surfboards has been limited. Despite the fact they were hazardous and toxic to work with, PU foam, polyester resin, and fibreglass was such a functional marriage of materials that surfboard builders had felt little need to find alternative materials. The closure of Clark Foam changed that.
The main alternative to replace PU foam is extruded polystyrene, or EPS foam – the material used to make Styrofoam cups. Building surfboards from EPS presents several challenges. EPS requires a different type of resin, since the resin commonly used with PU foam will melt EPS. A more environmentally friendly, but harder to control, water-based epoxy must be used. Another drawback of EPS was that, at least until very recently, no company offered pre-made EPS blanks, which added a few steps to the board building process.
One way to get around the PU supply problem is to build boards without any foam at all. Surfboards were built out of solid wood for centuries and hollow wood in the 1920s-1950s. In the 1940s and 1950s, balsa wood was the most popular core material for surfboards, before moulded PU blanks began to replace it. Recently, wooden boards have enjoyed something of a renaissance, as boatbuilding techniques have been applied to the challenge of fabricating surfboards from wooden members.
The environmental impact and sustainability of surfboard manufacture has increasingly come under the spotlight. Most surfboards are made from petrochemicals. Most have only a limited working life before wear and tear destroys their performance characteristics. And most are, to all intents and purposes, impossible to recycle and so are sent to a landfill where they take centuries to break down. Growing concern about the depletion of non-renewable resources and the degradation of the world's eco-systems has given rise to a call for more sustainable development. The challenge is usually seen in purely technical terms, one of improving production processes. Some surfboard manufacturers have improved efficiency and cleaned up their production systems, but little progress has been made in addressing the other part of the sustainable development challenge, that of achieving sustainable consumption.
Environmental problems are strongly connected to consumption, particularly when it goes beyond the meeting of real needs. Consumerism – the human desire for non-need items – is driven to a great extent by advertising and marketing, which serves to convince people to buy products they don't really need. The surfing industry is no exception. Glossy magazines, DVD's and lifestyle marketing, all serve to sell products to surfers. Surfers are often guilty of letting the waves pictured in magazines and movies dictate their surfboard choice, rather than letting the local idiosyncrasies and subtleties of their local break be the guide. As result, a surfer may accumulate a quiver of boards, where one good one would do for most of the time.
While board making has a long way to go before it can be termed eco-friendly, having a board locally made to suit local conditions, rather than buying a generic board built overseas and shipped into the country using carbon miles is one way surfers can become proactive sustainable consumers. Shapers have an obvious role here, in that they can provide boards that suit local conditions. They can also build equipment to last, rather than cynically sowing the seeds of continued demand by building light boards.
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