In traditional surfboard manufacturing, there is approximately double the finished surfboard's weight in waste (or trash) generated in the production process. This consists of materials from offcuts of fiberglass cloth or tech materials like basalt patches, tape, resin, gloves, stir sticks, foam dust, sand paper, and more. As much as we love surfing, this is far more waste than we'd like to think is acceptable.
So, we've been developing the surfboard industry’s first Circular Manufacturing system to close the loop on production waste! In early 2018 Ryan launched our ZERO WASTE INITIATIVE. Waste streams from all production rooms are categorized, then sorted. Eps blank offcuts are sent directly to Marko Foam where they are recycled. The rest of our manufacturing waste was upcycled and recycled into sustainable lifestyle products. As you can see above, we purposefully keep our drip trays covered with production waste. This allows the waste to saturate with resin that falls off boards during production, and once hard enough we run this waste through our high density plastic shredder.