Featured Image Credit: Fox News
By: Alice Morris
Calling all skateboarders and environmental enthusiasts alike. A new, eco-conscious skateboard is hitting pavements this summer and you won’t want to miss it.
Bureo boards are the first skateboards to be made out of recycled fishing nets and they’re making waves in the boarding community.
The innovative new product was dreamt up back in 2012, while Bureo co-founder Ben Knepper was working as an environmental consultant in Chile. A lifetime skater and outdoor enthusiast, Knepper saw firsthand the damaging effects that discarded fishing nets have on Chile’s coastline and he felt compelled to make a change.
With help from engineers David Stover and Kevin Ahearn, Knepper developed a prototype board and a supply chain dedicated to responsible, sustainable sourcing every step of the way.
Through their recycling initiative ‘Net Positiva,’ Bureo provides fishermen with disposal points for their old fishing nets. Those nets are collected, melted, and molded into skateboards to be sold online and in select stores around the world.
The initiative provides Bureo with an energy efficient material to produce their boards, while giving fishermen a convenient way to dispose of old nets that might otherwise get dumped back into the sea.
Thirty square feet of fishing net goes into making each Bureo board, and the company plans to produce 2,000 boards this year. Since its inception, the ‘Net Positiva’ initiative has kept 40 tons of fishing net out of the ocean, an impressive achievement that will have a lasting impact on the health of Chile’s coasts.
Of course, we still have a long way to go to get our oceans cleaned up. An estimated 640,000 tons of fishing nets are dumped into the sea every year, entangling and killing countless marine organisms. But companies like Bureo offer hope that it’s not too late to make a change. Sometimes the most complicated of problems can be solved with something as simple as a skateboard.
Check out Bureo’s debut board, the Minnow, online at bureoskateboards.com and in select stores in the U.S., Chile, Switzerland, and Japan.
And read more about Bureo’s mission at: grindtv.com and sciencedaily.com