there’s no shortage of innovation we can expect in the future of surfboard manufacturing. It’s not a secret that they aren’t exactly the most eco-friendly toys on the planet, and that kind of guilt has led more than a few people to play with different materials that can reduce surfing’s footprint on the world. Today, we get a surfboard covered completely in…cork.
Project Korko is a board with a recyclable polystyrene core and a flax/epoxy stringer, all 100% covered by raw cork. Notox Surfboards have designed three models – a 5’6″, a 6’6″, and a 7’6″ – going for about $420 USD Eventually on the low end, and while it’s not the first cork surfboard the world has ever seen, it does look like it’s the closest we’ve come to a truly green surfboard. Other cork boards are typically just a cork deck with your standard foam, fiberglass and resin components making up a majority of the surfboard. But from the looks of Korko’s Indiegogo campaign, they’ve stayed away from any of the Earth-killing materials that make up the traditional surfboard. ECOLIZER, a tool businesses can use to measure the environmental impact of their product, scored these boards to have a 55% weaker impact on the environment compared to a conventional surfboard. If I had any idea how the ECOLIZER works, what it actually measures, and how to decipher its points scale (the Korko scored 1,551 points to the conventional surfboard’s 3,455 points), I might be able to tell you what that 55% accounts for. But in the big picture, if the entire industry could somehow cut its footprint in half from manufacturing surfboards we’d obviously be making a drastically positive shift.
