Imagining A Sustainable Skateboard
How can we make an all-green skateboard (and we’re not talking about the one from Yeah Right!)?
Words by Christian Kerr
Illustrations by Walker Miller
You may not want to hear this, but it really ain’t looking good for ol’ planet Earth. Our environment is degrading with increasingly devastating effects on the world as we know it. That’s bad news for us, and worse news for the generations of skateboarders to come. Climate change, it seems, is threatening to become the ultimate skate stopper.
And, get this, humans are to blame! All of our incredible industries are pumping out massive amounts of pollution to make everything from fighter jets to fidget spinners. Skateboarding, too, is part of the problem (albeit a comparably justifiable one). “Skate and destroy” is an unfortunately apt summation of the toll our little industry takes on the natural world. From sourcing to shredding, the whole life cycle of the hardgoods we need (not to mention the soft goods we want) to do our thing has an adverse impact on our environment. But it doesn’t have to be so bad.
Skateboarders are naturally inclined to make the most out of a bleak situation, and the rest of the world seems to take cues from our culture about what’s cool. What if we turned our dogged creativity towards the intractable issue of addressing the causes of climate change? Maybe skaters could serve as a model for everyone else moving forward. Let’s break down the skateboard part by part to see what alternatives are out there, and then let’s imagine some more sustainable possibilities we could push towards.
WHEELS
The Problem
Pretty much every set of wheels available, from Autobahn to Zero, are made of polyurethane. This material grips the ground well, keeps its shape after sliding, and rides fast and smooth–everything a skater could ask for. But this blessing comes with a cost.
Polyol, one of polyurethane’s two main ingredients, is extracted from crude oil, a fossil fuel pulled from the Earth through pollutive processes like fracking. (Fracking has been reported to cause water contamination, earthquakes, and adverse health effects, from asthma to cancer, on the populations living nearby.) This means that every wheel you ride is partly the product of an unsustainable system that encourages our reliance on petroleum even as that proves more and more costly to come across.
Another problem with polyurethane is that it takes damn near forever to disappear when we’re done with it. That’s a selling point for other industrial uses of the stuff, but skaters go through sets often enough for it to be a major problem. There isn’t really an existing method to recycle the raw materials, so all our old wheels eventually wind up in landfills, decomposing over the next thousand or so years as generations of skaters add to the piles with flat-spotted sets evermore.
The Progress
Skaters could start straight-lining hills, foregoing powerslides altogether in an effort to maintain their wheels as long as possible. But some of us may prefer to emulate Leo Valls over Pedro Delfino, so a better idea is to come up with smarter ways to produce and reuse our wheels. A few starts have been made:
There are lots of options out there for more sustainable substitutes to oil-based wheels, mostly on the long-board market though: Sector 9 has a patented formula for wheels made with soybean-based polyols that are supposedly significantly less harmful to the environment; another company, called Vibronic offers a hemp/rubber set; and scientists are coming up with newer ideas like using chewed-gum or polycarbonate recycled plastic pretty regularly. But, turns out, it isn’t easy to reinvent the wheel, and none of these formulas have quite matched the performance of the polyurethane type that most skateboarders prefer.
As for recycling, there’ve been some notable attempts to creatively address the end stage of a wheel’s lifecycle. A few years back the clothing company Analog used old wheels in the finishing process of their “Wheel Wear” denim. Satori, the crunchiest company of the mid-2000s (apparently back in business these days), had the Re-Life wheel recycling program, where shops or skaters could mail in their old wheels to be cut down to the core and remolded using about 70% recycled materials. Though none of these programs are currently in operation, they’ve made some early steps in reimagining the way we get and get rid of the wheels we ride.
The Possibility
For a more sustainably produced wheel, companies will need to keep tinkering with formulas, something they’re unlikely to do without market demand for the innovation. That means skaters, especially those professionals responsible for promoting the products, need to be willing to try out alternatives to polyurethane with the hope that a better alternative will catch on.
Another hypothetical improvement would be to expand the Satori recycling program into a sort of subscription wheel service, where you’d purchase a set–made of some yet-to-be-perfected, all-natural compound–for a certain price, and then, instead of buying a whole new set you’d send in your old set to be cut down and recreated at a lower cost to you and the environment. If the entire market transformed into this kind of system, skateboarders would be able to reduce their reliance on fossil fuels while cutting back on the amount of waste inevitable in our wheel production.
HARDWARE+BEARINGS+TRUCKS
The Problem
Let’s get metal: Bearings, probably the least problematic part of a setup, are most often made of steel, which is an especially difficult metal to recycle. A cheap set of bearings might last a skater a couple of years if they take care of them, but they’re so inexpensive as to usually be treated as expendable, ready for the trash as soon as they get to stuttering. That results in a lot of steel rusting away in dumps around the world. All the same goes for the hardware as well, no matter if it's Allen, Phillips, or Hardies fists.
Most trucks have a steel axle and kingpin, polyurethane bushings, and an aluminum hanger and baseplate. Steel, as noted above, isn’t easily recycled; the polyurethane bushings are bad for the same reason wheels are; and the process to make aluminum is terrible for the land and for the people that mine and refine it.
The Progress
This will be a short section because little has been done to try and minimize the environmental harm of these products. There are bearings made of ceramic that are meant to last a lifetime, which, if used en masse would decrease the need to produce so many sets a year and cut down on how many are discarded. But, at upwards of $150, they’re prohibitively expensive to most skaters.
In the truck department, companies have experimented with hollow hangers and titanium mixtures, but these are mostly done for “performance-enhancing” reasons and have little real impact on their sustainability. One promising development is the creation of newer truck companies, outside of the United States, like Jeremie Daclin’s Film Trucks out of France and Oski’s Lurpiv out of Sweden. Lurpiv is cool because they produce and manufacture their products within their home country (similar to Thunder and Venture which are poured at Ermico in San Francisco) meaning they cut back on greenhouse gas emissions from the supply chain and put less pollution in the air than other pairs of trucks produced abroad and shipped across the world and back again.
The Possibility
From the consumer’s end, we could all be working out the most effective ways to keep old bearings alive for as long as possible, whether that means coming up with ingenious cleaning solutions or upgrading to the most durable and long-lasting options available. But our trucks offer an opportunity for a more radical rethinking. Steel is almost invincibly-strong, so, hypothetically, we could be reusing our axles. Aluminum, on the other hand, has this amazing ability to never lose its strength no matter how many times it’s recycled, which means we could figure out a way to recycle and reuse our beat-up axles.
Kirby Clark, who runs Decks for Change, a non-profit that focuses on this kind of thing, proposed to me that we consider “transitioning to service-based systems rather than product-based systems, so the designer and manufacturer take responsibility for the full life cycle of the product.” So, imagine a truck company that takes back your old trucks, recycles all the aluminum, and reuses all the steel to return to you the old soul of your trucks with nice and “new” hangars and baseplates. Ideally, this could be repeated for as long as your axles stay straight, which, unless you’re taking Sheckler-sized drops shouldn’t happen for a long time. This system puts our industry in the position to, in Kirby’s words, “recapture those precious materials that would be trash and turn them back into products,” so we skaters can continue to try to nosegrind non-waxed ledges guilt-free.
DECK
The Problem
Pretty much every skateboard on the wall at your local skateshop is going to be seven plies of maple wood cut from forests around Canada or China and pressed and printed in a manufacturing facility in Mexico or China–enough international travel to make Kenny Reed jealous.
All that wood requires a whole lot of trees, and maple trees take a particularly long time to mature to the stage in which we prefer them (kind of like Louie Lopez). Reforestation measures are made to try and ensure a consistent supply of properly aged trees, but with skateboarding getting more and more popular, and our climate becoming less and less conducive to large-scale agricultural planning, it’s clear this system isn’t exactly the most sustainable.
Plastic waste is also a big problem with our skateboard decks, and not just the cellophane packaging (more on that later). Most graphics are heat-transfers, which require a non-recyclable plastic sheet for each application. Plastic pollution has had apocalyptic effects on our ocean life, and it seems especially cruel to subject seals, whales, and turtles to harm in order to print another run of box-logo rip-off graphics.
The Progress
If you see how much energy it takes to make a single deck you may shudder to even think about focusing a board again. The super-eco-conscious skater might even start riding their boards until they can use their razor tail to cut the grip on their next deck. But what are manufacturers doing to try and be more sustainable?
Some smaller companies make a point to hand silk-screen their graphics to cut back on their plastic waste. The enterprising guys at Carpet Company, for example, even sell curved squeegees that print perfectly across a skateboard’s concave to encourage other brands to print their own.
Other brands, many of them on the peripheries of what many skaters consider core, are working on alternative materials to use instead of maple. Over the past couple of decades, there’ve been dozens of innovations, all touting different benefits: there’s bamboo, which grows fast and is easily replenished; carbon fiber, which is strong and weather-resilient; Dwindle seems to come out with a newer and more high-tech board every year; and there are even skateboards made out of old recycled skateboards (not to mention the million other things, like rings, sunglasses, and Haroshi statues, made with old skate decks).
But, despite the promise, none of these technologies have proven more than a gimmick, or at least none have been adopted by enough skaters to catch on. There’s a great Transworld article from 2002 that goes through basically all the same innovations on offer today, which should say something about how little real progress has been made to make skate decks more sustainable nearly twenty years later.
The Possibility
We’ve got a good start on making skate decks more sustainable already. Our recycling methods are myriad, and industry-led initiatives to make these options readily available could result in few if any boards being wasted in landfills. Ensuring that production processes use non-toxic glues and inks (as most already do), and pushing brands to stop heat transfers would all help. In the far-off future, we could look towards the elimination of graphics completely, moving away from a company-led industry to a more small-scale and localized one.
Another possibility is presented by re:ply Skateboards out of Scotland, which takes old boards and reshapes them into something useable again, essentially multiplying the lifespan of any deck. More fundamentally, though, we should try and reimagine the logistics of production, so each deck doesn’t have to travel around the world and back before being sold. That might mean creating new, more local production facilities. And that also might mean moving away from our complete reliance on maple, which only grows well in certain climates. Surely there’s some combination of materials that is energy-efficient to source, perfect to skate, and easy enough to recycle once we’re sick of it. Skateboarders will just need to be willing to ride them once they’re available.
GRIP
The Problem
The last piece of the skateboard to improve upon is the griptape. The stuff most griptape is made out of–silicon carbide on an adhesive polyester sheet–isn’t exactly great for the environment. Polyester is a plastic, and the process to fuse the grit into the tape takes a lot of energy. But the worst thing about griptape is the thing we market it for–its grippiness, and the destruction it causes our footwear. Skaters can shred a dozen shoes a year, and even if they’re passed down to an opposite-stanced skater, all that leather and rubber and glue piles up into mountains of waste.
The Progress
Leading grip companies like Jessup, which manufactures in the USA, often use as many recyclable materials as possible in their traditional grip, but that doesn’t make them any less destructive to your kicks. More interesting are the pretty funky attempts at more shoe-friendly alternatives to the gritty griptape we use now: Simon Woodstock skated a carpeted deck in a contest in ‘93, Gou Miyagi darkslide down handrails on carpet and bamboo mat covered decks; Habitat used to have a series of cork-topped cruiser boards; and a company called DKL has a rubber griptape that boasts the tagline: “Griptape that won’t rip your shoes.” Options exist, but they’re not often available or considered cool enough to cut it.
The Possibility
A solution to this problem requires a two-way strategy. Most importantly, we should work to make sure our shoes are as sustainable as they possibly can be so that when we inevitably do need to replace them that action will have as little consequence to the environment as possible (a topic so important it needs its own article). And skateboarders should start considering some of the existing alternatives to griptape that are out there, or try and innovate their own. An easy way to wean away from gritty grip is to try out an alternative on a cruiser board, so you can still stunt when you want but also have the option to preserve your kicks a little longer.
PACKAGING
Pretty much all of these products are sold shrink-wrapped in plastic or cellophane. While cellophane is compostable, it also releases toxic gases in its creation. And for what? So that these products arrive to you, the consumer, clean and unscuffed, straight off the assembly line. Deck collectors aside, this is mostly useless since most of us set these things up and immediately get to thrashing them, showing off our slide marks as signifiers of our tasteful trick selection.
Some companies have recognized this and experimented with reduced packaging on their products. Anti-Hero recently did a collaboration with Gnarhunters that sent boards (and the rest of the merch line) to shops without the cellophane shrink-wrap. Instead, the boards were packaged with twine and recycled cardboard. Word from an employee at Labor Skateshop is that nobody complained about there not being plastic wrap. Shop employees just made sure to nestle the decks between others to prevent any unnecessary wear-and-tear, and the boards sold all the same, without any extra waste.
This was a short-lived experiment, apparently difficult to push up to scale, but it shows that the industry is both interested in and capable of creative alternatives to cellophane packaging, they just need to push that idea to all the products across the board.
RECYCLING
One great thing about skateboarders is our creative ways of reusing things. That’s what we do when we street skate, enlivening the wasted asphalt expanses of modern civilization in ways others had never thought about. We also have a deep and ingrained sense of community which means if a product has any life left in it at all it’ll probably be handed down before being tossed away.
Skateshops have traditionally acted as the de facto drop-off spots for used goods (maybe to the occasional annoyance of their employees), which keeps old products flowing to new blood as needed. And recently DLX started its “Keep It Rolling” campaign, which places ready-to-mail boxes at skateshops to be shipped off to organizations in need. This, in effect, formalizes this preexisting grassroots donation system to encourage its growth and ensure products can go to places where they’re most appreciated.
Now, imagine if this system was streamlined via an intelligently-designed algorithm and expanded via the global connectivity of the internet. This hypothetical system could make sure the burgeoning skate scene in Kurdistan or Malaysia or wherever can get used stuff sent over from places like Los Angeles or Minneapolis that might have a surplus of supplies. This idea comes with its own set of logistical problems, sure, but is one way to approach redistributing what we have so that skateboarding can continue to spread responsibly.
CAN SKATERS SAVE THE WORLD?
All of the above depends on one major thing: skateboarders pushing to make these changes possible. None of this is easy to do. It’ll require innovations most companies aren’t set up to push forward and entails risks most consumers are wary to shill out. But if we want to keep skating alive, we owe it to the Earth we skate on to give it a go.
Now, after all that, I’ve got to break the bad news: Say by some miracle we did manage to make skateboarding completely sustainable, it’d still only make a minor impact in bettering humanity's chance at survival. The world of skateboarding is relatively small when considering how much harm the greatest contributors of greenhouse gases are causing. But that doesn’t mean skateboarders are powerless to hold these organizations to account.
There are reportedly about 7 million skateboarders in the U.S. alone and as many as 30 million worldwide; together we wield incredible financial, cultural, and political power–let’s flex it. We need to put pressure on those that control the levers of power–the government institutions and corporations they’re so often in service to–and force them to reckon with the world that’s to come while demonstrating a better way to live within it.
Some say it’s already impossible to avert the oncoming disaster, but skateboarders have a unique understanding of those words. To us, the impossible is just a trick, and even the scariest disaster can be rolled away from if we lean in in just the right ways. Skaters are just the kind of radical doers humanity needs to take that leap of faith, let’s commit before the spot’s shut down for good.