Sustainable Guide to Surfing | Stuff
component inside breaks and it’s easier to buy the entire unit instead of fixing it, or because that model goes out of fashion and your mates laugh at you if you don’t buy a new one. This is called planned obsolescence56. As that phrase suggests, it is totally intentional as is a strategy for the companies to make as much profit as possible, to keep churning out products as fast as possible. It is also a great way to burn up all the resources we have on the planet and poison ourselves as soon as possible. At the moment, planned obsolescence is most prevalent in electronic stuff, which we go through at a frightening speed, but it is has also been subtly introduced into surfing gear, such as wetsuits that only last one winter, or boards that snap in four-foot beachbreaks.
Image courtesy of Greg Martin
The extraction phase Before something is manufactured, the raw materials have to come from somewhere. Metals, for example, come from rocks which have to be mined out of the ground. Open-cast mining, in other words, blowing the top off a mountain to access the rocks underneath, and then letting chemicals such as cyanide or arsenic wash into the surrounding soil, is probably the quickest way to destroy a natural area of land. Some raw materials, such as cotton or paper, come from plants. But vast monocrop plantations of cotton or eucalyptus trees also involve some sort of environmental degradation such as deforestation and soil erosion. Arsenic from mines has stopped anything growing for at least 150 years
Then, of course, you have plastics. It is difficult to think of something that you own that doesn’t contain plastic of some sort. Practically all our surfing gear is made from plastic, including our wetsuits. Plastic is chemically formulated from oil, and oil is a fossil fuel which took millions of years to form from decomposing trees. Once you have produced plastic, you just can’t make it go away. In almost all cases, the extraction and formulation of raw materials is irreversible; the surrounding environment is permanently changed, and the raw material itself may never get back to its original state. To get the bodywork of your car back into the rocks it originally came from, or to transform a plastic bottle back into the ancient trees which produced the oil, either takes an absurdly long time, or may never happen at all. The production phase After the raw materials have been obtained, they somehow have to be gathered together and made into a useful product. In the past, the people who designed, manufactured and sold a product usually worked for the same company, and often this was done in the same factory. But things have radically changed over the last 20 years or so. Now a lot of companies who sell clothes, wetsuits and even surfboards, don’t actually make anything at all because the entire manufacturing process is ‘outsourced’.
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