SAN CLEMENTE, Calif.
A few blocks from the beach, the pungent smell of polyester resin wafts from the surfboard factories that crowd an alley known as the surf ghetto in this Southern California town. Inside warrens of rooms painted ocean blue, young men wearing face masks shape slabs of snow-white polyurethane foam into surfboards, the cast-off chemical dust covering floors and filling trash barrels.
Despite its nature-boy image, the American surfing industry often relies on toxic manufacturing processes and generates tons of waste to make surfboards and other products. While surfers have long fought polluters that befoul beaches and oceans, the surfing industry — which has annual revenue of $7.2 billion, according to the Surf Industry Manufacturing Association, a trade group — is also focusing on cleaning up its own backyard.
“The dirtiest thing about surfing is under our feet — a conventional surfboard is 100 percent toxic,” said Frank Scura, a surfer and executive director of the Action Sports Environmental Coalition, an organization that promotes green retailing.
In San Clemente, a start-up company called Green Foam Blanks is out to change a half-century of surfboard-making tradition. Its founders, Joey Santley and Steve Cox, have created what is thought to be the world’s first recycled polyurethane blank — the foam core of a surfboard.
They collect polyurethane cuttings from surfboard factories and, using a proprietary process, mix the trimmings with virgin foam to create a blank that is 60 to 65 percent recycled waste. The goal is to reduce production of new foam, which is typically made with a carcinogenic compound called toluene diisocyanate, or TDI.
“Every day in Southern California, about 800 boards are being shaped and as much as 40 percent of each blank, which contains toxic materials, ends up being put into landfills,” said Mr. Santley, who is 44 and a veteran of the surfing industry.
About 316,000 surfboards were sold in the United States in 2008, generating about $150 million in revenue, according to the Surf Industry Manufacturing Association. Revenue also includes clothing and other equipment.
Green Foam has sold about 1,000 recycled surfboard blanks since it began production earlier this year. Mr. Santley has put Green Foam surfboards into the hands of surfing celebrities like Cameron Diaz and surfer-singers like Jason Mraz, as well as professional surfers and influential board makers.
It is an approach born of necessity — Mr. Santley and Mr. Cox are financing Green Foam themselves — and the idiosyncratic nature of the surfboard industry. Surfing is still largely a tribal affair, and outsiders and new ways are often viewed with suspicion.
Mr. Santley, though, is a consummate surfing insider, on a “Hey, dude” basis with many of the business’s opinion makers. He grew up surfing the Orange County coast, the Silicon Valley of the surf industry, where his father owned a surfboard and foam factory. He started his own company while in high school, making skim boards — short boards used close to the shoreline — and after college worked as a marketing executive at various surfing-related companies.
Even so, foam makers slammed the door when he approached them last year about testing recycled polyurethane. “They’re like, ‘We don’t allow anyone in our factory; it’s secret,’ ” recalled Mr. Santley.
Until 2006, a single Orange County company, Clark Foam, supplied more than 80 percent of the world’s surfboard blanks. When Clark Foam suddenly closed — the company said it was under pressure over its use of TDI — the market opened for new manufacturing processes, said Sean Smith, executive director of the Surf Industry Manufacturing Association.
China stepped up exports of blanks made from polystyrene, which some industry members consider environmentally superior to polyurethane. Some manufacturers began experimenting with more benign chemicals to make polyurethane.
Eventually, Mr. Santley persuaded an engineer at one manufacturer to let him cast the first recycled blank last November.
“I said, ‘Hey, bro, I grew up in a surfboard factory,’ ” said Mr. Santley, who wears the surf industry version of the pinstriped suit: T-shirt, shorts, sandals and sunglasses. Since then, he has pursued what might be called a B-to-B strategy — “bro-to-bro” — selling Green Foam blanks to star surfboard shapers, who build boards for well-known surfers.
“I really love that you can take old surfboards, grind them up and make more surfboards instead of sticking them in landfills,” said Donavon Frankenreiter, a pro surfer turned musician who owns Green Foam surfboards. “They ride great and look cool. I ask them to keep them rough so you can see pieces of old board, fiberglass and string.”
On a recent afternoon, Mr. Santley wandered through the surf ghetto, stepping into the back rooms of factories, greeting shapers and checking on their supply of Green Foam blanks.
Outside one factory, Mr. Santley ran into Tyler Callaway, an executive with Surf Hardware International. The company is developing a recycled surfboard fin called Green Flex, made partly from discarded carpets that have been melted into resin.
“We probably put out a million units a year,” said Mr. Callaway, who keeps two Green Foam surfboards in the back of his truck. “Each surfboard has three or four fins. We looked at what’s the single greatest single impact we can take in a single step, and Green Flex was it.”
Matt Biolos, a leading surfboard shaper known in the industry as Mayhem and an owner of Lost Enterprises in San Clemente, said he had tried making boards from greener blanks, but they did not measure up to polyurethane products.
“Surfers are not going to sacrifice the performance of a light board for being green,” Mr. Biolos said.
The key advantage of Green Foam’s recycled blanks, he said, is that they are priced competitively, perform like new polyurethane boards and do not require shapers to change the way they make boards. The down side is that Green Foam produces a higher rate of defective blanks, he said, a problem Mr. Santley acknowledged.
Green Foam’s immediate challenge is increasing its production. The company’s original manufacturer recently went out of business, and Green Foam is making its own blanks while it pursues licensing deals with other foam makers.
