Presentation

Environmental Issues

Outdoor sport practicing people are marked by a strong environmental aware and surf of course is no exception. Surfers have always been in the frontline when denouncing environmental abuses; creating voluntary organizations for helping the beaches being cleaned, promoting campaigns for the change of certain government policies among others, contributing to the raise of the overall aware on issues like pollution and habitat destruction.

However, exists nowadays a strong contradiction between the values and beliefs of the users and the ecological impact caused by the practice of the sport and the acquisition of equipment. Surf industry produces around 750,000 surf boards each year. Only a extremely low number of such boards are made of sustainable or bio-degradable materials, and not even the rate of non toxic materials used is significant.

The creation and spreading of environmentally sustainable alternatives to traditional foam may mean a great step for reducing the ecological impact of the surf industry and it will help the developing itself of the surf as an activity. Moreover, it will reconcile definitively the practices of the surf industry with the values and expectations of the surf practising people.

The most important environmental constraint in surf industry has to do with the manufacturing and the use of foam, which it is the inner material of a surfboard. The foam used I n surf industry presents two major problems, the toxicity and a impossibility to recycle or bio-degrade the material once its life cycle has ended. Related tro this fact, a growing concern is being detected around the health and environmental risks that the foam based in Isocianatos is creating, specially the TDI. This Foam is the one traditionally used for world surf market, and its use is creating serious environmental impacts, absolutely confronted with the values and beliefs of the target audience.

TXFOAM is a project aimed to the development and production of new ecologic foam, no toxic and recyclable, for its use in surf industry.

Driven by GAIA (Basque Cluster of Telecommunications), and ESTIA (Engineer School from Bidart), the main objective of the project is the obtaining of a environmentally sustainable material, which properties in terms of cost and mechanical performance have to be similar to those owned by the PU Foam used currently in the industry.

To sum up, the goal of the project is to provide surf industry with a sustainable alternative to traditional foam. As a consequence, industrial practices will at least reconcile with the values of the surfer community, highly committed with the conservation of natural environments.

TX Foam will mean a drastic reduction in the environmental impact generated by the surf industry, removing the toxicity caused by traditional foam and its impossibility to recycle in the final phase of the life cycle. That way, the main and most important environmental problematic of the industry will be neutralized.