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Make Mine Green - Snowboards even Mother Nature can Love

2008-05-12 22:28:34

As winter sports enthusiasts (i.e snowboarders), we should want to be able to continue doing the activity we love while not jeopardizing the season that supports it with our carbon footprint. Protect Our Winters, a non-profit whose mandate is to "build a united front of winter sports enthusiasts, so that together, we can restore our winter climates", provides a list of sixteen things you can do to protect winter and reduce your carbon footprint. This can be simplified to a single principle: make more sustainable and environmentally conscious decisions in your daily life. This includes purchasing snowboards.

The market for environmentally friendly snowboards is currently small but growing. A few short seasons ago, snowboards that boasted sustainability as a design requirement were few and far between. More and more companies, however, are jumping on the green bandwagon including some of the more mainstream ones. The following is a short list of what's currently available and what will be available for the 2008/2009 season:

Salomon Snowboards:

Salomon Snowboards is a sub-division of Salomon Group which produces products for various sports markets, including trail running, hiking, skiing, and snowboarding. They recently started a program called the G.I.F.T. Project: Green Initiative For Tomorrow, and have spent the last three years looking into reducing the ecological impact of snowboard manufacturing while improving riding performance. The fruits of this labour are the SickStick and the Answer, two snowboards which use bamboo veneers to sandwich the cores as opposed to the more traditional layers of fiberglass and resin. In addition to making these boards less impactful on the environment, the use of bamboo in their construction makes them lighter (Salomon claims a 10% weight reduction), durable, and waterproof. This is important for the snowboarder who is very demanding of their equipment and also very conscious of their environment.

• The SickStick: A new school powder board with double pointy noses. It will be available in 2009 in 156, 160 and 163.
• The Answer: A twin shaped all mountain board with a directional flex pattern. No details available on sizes.

K2:

This year, K2 Snowboards have made great efforts to minimize their material consumption and to contain their waste stream. They've introduced HybriLight Construction which makes their new "0" lighter and stronger than other snowboards. This new construction technique is said to completely eliminate the usage of ABS plastic, and produce a fiberglass that is 35% stronger thus requiring less construction material. In addition, K2 claims to have eliminated 85% of plastic packaging material, 94% of ink and solvents, the need for a UV coating, and produced the wood cores from sustainably harvested Aspen and Bamboo which regrows from existing root systems after cutting thereby mitigating soil erosion. "All this sounds pretty green, but how does it ride?" you might ask. Check out the Fembots review of the K2 Zero to find out.

• The "0": Is a twin shaped board with a set back stance and standard rocker. It will be available as a 152, 156, 159 and 162.

Arbor:

Arbor sports has been manufacturing skateboards, snowboards, and apparel using environmentally friendly natural materials since 1995. They have by far the largest offering of environmentally friendly snowboards of any manufacturer (13). They use a natural bamboo veneer as a top-sheet material, and a mixture of hard bamboo, poplar, and paulonia for their cores all of which are accessed from suppliers who produce their wood products sustainably. Paulonia is an exceptionally renewable material due to its fast growth. It is also very light weight yet provides the same tensile strength as poplar or aspen. Here's what's available from Arbor:

• Mystic: A freestlye board meant for park/pipe junkies.
• Westmark: All mountain freestyle for those who like to throw it down in the deep snow.
• Draft: New school twin shape. A more jib-specific board.
• Element: A versatile all-mountain board.
• Wasteland: Mid-wide all-mountain board.
• Alt: Same design as the Wasteland with a bamboo top.
• Roundhouse: Big mountain floater. Built wide to support big feet.
• Formula: All mountain cruiser.
• Cadence: An all-mountain board for women who like to throw down anywhere.
• Abacus: Tapered freeride board.
• A-frame: A freeride specific carver for those looking for maximum edge performance.
• Crossbow: An all mountain freeride board for the more aggressive rider.
• Push: Women's specific freerider board.

Venture Snowboards

Venture is a small, family owned, independent snowboard manufacturer, nestled in Colorado's remote San Juan Mountains. They have been making snowboards and incorporating sustainable materials and techniques into the manufacturing process since their inception in 1999. All hard woods are sustainably harvested and their factory has been completely powered by wind since 2004. They offer five boards in an array of sizes (narrow, medium and wide) but will also build boards to specification:

• Zephyr: This board is designed for all-mountain versatility. It's a directional board with a 7mm taper. A Future Snowboarding Magazine top pick two years running, this board is meant to go anywhere and ride anything. I own one of these and I love it.
• Helix: An all-mountain freestyle board with a twin shape and a slightly stiffer flex pattern.
• Euphoria: A powder specific board with a dramatically tapered shape and softer, wider nose.
• Storm: An all-mountain freestyle with a moderately tapered shape. Similar to the Zephyr with a more powder oriented shape.
• Divide: Venture's split board offering for those into backcountry randonées. This has the added "green" quality that using your legs to get around in the back country is much more environmentally friendly than a snowmobile.

There are many choices available to the environmentally conscientious snowboarder in the 2008/2009 season. Be careful, however, to not do more harm than good when purchasing your gear. Often it is much better to get a board that was manufactured locally, with less emphasis on sustainability, than to have a more sustainable model shipped from very far away. The carbon footprint in shipping might nullify the reductions of the more sustainably built board.

The above list of snowboards is by no means exhaustive. If you can't find any of these boards, or would like to explore other sustainable options, here are a few things to keep in mind while shopping for your eco-snowboard:

• Bamboo is an ideal construction material because it is naturally organic, requires zero pesticides, chemical fertilizers, irrigation, or detrimental cultivation and harvesting practices to grow in an incredibly fast, self propagating manner. A notable benefit of its quick growth is that it will trap CO₂ while it is growing, effectively reducing the amount that is floating around the atmosphere.
• Ensure that whenever possible, the snowboard is constructed using locally sourced material, it reduces the carbon footprint of the board as there is no need for materials to be shipped to the factory from far away.
• Although bamboo is a wonderful construction material, it will not be suitable for all parts of a snowboard. Although it does replace the need for many petroleum-based resins, hard woods are still the best for snowboard cores. Ensure that you're hard wood core is sourced sustainably.
• Don't sacrifice performance. If you don't enjoy riding your board, you'll just end up buying another one thereby defeating any gains made by purchasing a green board in the first place.

So tie your dreadlocks back, put your birkenstocks on and walk your butt down to your local snowboard shop to look for your next eco-board. If we all pitch in and do our part, we'll help to sustain a continued state of winter which will allow us to

Keep Shreddin' the GNAR!

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