Green is the new black

There are quite a few bamboo based boards out there. According to some sources (more on that in a few) the skateboard industry has surpassed the hardwood floor industry as the number one world consumer of hard maple trees. lets put that into perspective. If properly cared for, a hardwood floor can last 100 plus years in house, while a skateboard isn’t going to last a year unless you’re just using it for transportation. Now consider that a maple tree takes 28 years to mature for use commercially. Sustainability is big in industry right now. It’s even creeping into skateboarding, mostly through the red headed stepchild of skateboarding, longboarding. I’ve seen a few of them up close and they don’t look quite ready for prime time, at least as far as short boards go. It sure would be great if a decent shortboard could be made out of bamboo. There’s a TV program on the Science Channel called Invention Nation where a bunch of hippies the show’s hosts travel the country in a biodiesel powered van and investigate cottage industry inventors of green technologies. It’s a short bus, but it’s green, not yellow. Comet Skateboards was featured on the Less Landfill episode for work on a bamboo composite board. It doesn’t air again until March 17, but you can watch it here.

Comet’s sustainable skateboards.

Comet’s green board technology is called Biohip and Biopop. Near as I can tell, they are one in the same, differing only in the type of board that gets made. The web site is slick, but doesn’t do nearly as good of a job explaining the technology as the short Invention Nation video does. Basically, they’ve got hemp fabric that is soaked in a soy protein that reacts to heat in pressure in a way that makes it stronger than traditional wood. The hemp-soy sandwiches a bamboo core. I forgot to mention that the glue is not petroleum based like most skateboard epoxies are. It looks like they are making a traditional board out of this too. I wonder how they last.

Comet Skatebaords on Invention Nation

Find out more about Invention Nation on the official site.

A few points of interest: It’s pretty amazing how stiff that fiber becomes almost instantly. They’ve taken the in press time down from hours to minutes. In theory, that could make them cheaper, as long as the materials aren’t more expensive. More on that later.

The boards in the video are not the ones in their current product lineup. Comet’s production boards still have 4 plies of maple in addition to the three plies of environmentally sustainable and inert materials. Does this mean an all bamboo and hemp composite board can not pass standards? I realize they did a rush job for the sake of the video, but the finished board is a little ragged on the edges from the frayed fabric. The other bamboo layered longboards I’ve seen seem to have very fragile edges.

It looks like they are licensing the technology from a company called e2e Materials. They must keep a tight reign on it because the segment was shot in Ithaca New York instead of San Francisco where Comet is actually based. Makes you wonder about the less-than-green practice of manufacturing on the east coast and warehousing on the west coast. Maybe that was just the test facility or the decision to film there was based on the logistics of where they were touring. The technology seems extremely promising, but who knows how restrictive the licensing agreements are. e2e has to make money, and Comet needs to differentiate themselves from their competition, but I’d hate to see a situation like.. I don’t know, suppose you made an HIV vaccine and then licensed and priced it out of reach of the poorest people who need it the most… Sounds crazy right? Yes, comparing environmentally sustainable skateboard manufacturing processes to an AIDS vaccine is not appropriate, but you get the picture. If the technology can help keep us from treating the world’s forests like one giant corn field, then we all ought to be using it. It’s a good thing they don’t have Canadian Maple forests in Iraq…