Young surfer and engineer Emile Theau won a major startup award for creating 95% biodegradable performance surfboards. They’re affordable, too.
This month, the Ocean Impact Organisation and HP Australia bestowed the first-ever Generation Impact Incubator Award to Emile Theau for his innovative, 95% biodegradable surfboard design and low-waste manufacturing methods.
In 2020, Theau, an experienced surfer with an engineering background, partnered up with Alastair Pilley, an environmental scientist, to found Sine Surf. They’d learned about the toxic processes involved in modern surfboard manufacturing and the hazards that most boards pose to the environment, and they wanted to find a solution.
The World’s Most Sustainable Surfboard
Pilley and Theau began creating more eco-stable prototypes, ultimately landing on a hollow performance surfboard design carved from highly renewable paulownia wood.
Generation Impact Award for Biodegradable Surfboard
“With approximately 20 million surfboards sold per year globally, [the waste resulting from typical foam and fiberglass boards] accounts for 160,000 tonnes of plastic waste, much of which can take over 500 years to biodegrade. [Sine Surf’s] methods drastically reduce the manufacturing time of hollow wooden surfboards to 25% of the previous 30 hours it would generally take a skilled craftsman. Furthermore, with new automation and design, surfboards are over 95% biodegradable by volume, produce less than 0.5 kg of industrial waste during manufacturing, and are better than net zero emissions.”
