For eco-friendly surfboard shapers, more kelp in the lineup 0
Surfing’s dirty secret is easy to find in the drab enclave of San Clemente known as the surf ghetto, where the ocean breeze is spiked with the sweet smell of chemicals and men wearing flip-flops and coated with white dust search for magic inside blocks of toxic foam.
Joey Santley is looking for something equally elusive: an environmentally friendly surfboard. Or at least one with a carbon footprint that’s less titanic.
“A ‘green surfboard’ is inherently an oxymoron at this point,” said Santley, 44, a frenetic surfboard shaper and entrepreneur. “Hopefully in the future it won’t be.”
Two years ago, Santley and a partner formed Green Foam Blanks, which makes rigid foam surfboard cores by fusing polyurethane with recycled polyurethane dust gathered from workshops that would otherwise discard it. That yields more boards per ounce of toxic polyurethane. The company recently signed a deal with a leading maker of traditional blanks to manufacture and distribute its product in North America, Japan, Europe and Costa Rica.
Still, this being a start-up, Santley is chief dust collector as well as part-owner.
He darts down a gangway between two nondescript buildings and bounds up the stairs of one of the neighborhood’s numerous surfboard factories. Under a whirring cutting machine, he hits gold: a pile of white polyurethane foam shavings as light as Rocky Mountain snow.
“This is like a perfect powder day,” Santley said, shoveling the stuff into a trash bag and holding it aloft. “Probably enough for about a dozen boards. And it won’t end up in the landfill.”
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