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 right now 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.
Editor’s Note: You can learn more about Notox Surfboard’s Project Korko on Indiegogo here.
