Surfer Turns Beach Trash Into Surf Boards

Amid the beauty of ocean waves and sandy shores is an all too frequent outlier: garbage.

Surfer Kevin Cunningham spends a good deal of time near the water and reports first-hand that “the beaches we all love to visit are being plagued with trash; trash that washes up onto the shores from the massive drifts of debris in the ocean.”

But as the designer behind Spirare Surfboards, Cunningham also found himself in a position to do something about it. The avid surfer and art school graduate decided to launch a series of boards that incorporate reclaimed debris such as plastic and glass into its skin.

Examples include “plastic bags woven into a strengthening cloth; plastic bottles cut up and reassembled into fins, driftwood inlayed into intrinsic patterns, and many other possibilities,” he writes on his website.

Cunningham already produces boards with a recycled foam interior, however these new boards are still in the idea stage: the goal, with funding through Kickstarter, is to create a series of functional boards with recycled garbage that double as works of art for gallery display around the country, followed by a signed series of 100 boards for sale.

By Alison Neumer Lara

From earth911.com