On opening day of the Pipe Masters surf contest this year, we watched Tanner Gudauskas break three boards in one heat. One four-foot, tow-headed grommet snagged the nose of a snapped surfboard, winning a prized contest souvenir. While Gudauskas remained in one piece through the next round of competition, we couldn’t stop talking about that worthless chunk of foam and glass that kid was now guarding with his life.

Many more boards will break on the North Shore before the season’s swells cease, and all those board scraps will be added to the already overcrowded landfill at Waimanalo Gulch. Isle residents realize this, so we re-purpose surfboards as signs, furniture, artwork and more. But what if, as we do with plastic bottles, we could chop up old junk surfboards and make new ones?

In partnership with the Surfrider Foundation this summer, the Honolulu Academy of Arts Surf Film Festival showed Manufacturing Stoke, a documentary about the challenges of achieving environmental sustainability in the surf industry. The film features Marko Foam, a California surfboard blank builder who is partnered with the Waste to Waves project, to collect waste Expanded Polystyrene (EPS) foam and reprocess it into new surfboard blanks. This collaboration is already reducing the environmental and health impacts of the surfing industry.

“Over a surfboard’s entire lifetime, it is the manufacture of a board’s foam core and petrochemical resin that make up most of the carbon footprint,”said Tobias Schultz, founder of the Sustainable Surfing Coalition. “These two board components account for the lion’s share of the total toxic by-products, as well,” he added.

Styrofoam, as Nick Castele has examined elsewhere on Civil Beat, has become a sticking point like plastic bags in trees between environmentalists and businesses in Hawaii. A local version of this surfboard and styrofoam reincarnation effort could become the olive branch. Deconstructor and re-retailer, ReUse Hawaii, is an excellent example. Retailers with surplus packaging could be the blank builder’s endless supply. The retailer gets a pat on the back for being green, the community sees less waste, and surfers stay stoked. If the blank is shaped and glassed by one of Hawaii’s finest, then the product is all-local and undoubtedly, all-time.

It’s easy to imagine this scenario – just like kids contemplating Santa Claus. So if you’re opening or giving gifts this weekend, use your imagination as a child would; the best thing about a new television might just be the giant box it comes in. For surfers, maybe it can soon be the foam packaging that you would have thrown away. Just as tradesmen in the United Kingdom collected boxes of donations after Christmas, surfers could collect donations of foam to make our holidays and daily habit more sustainable.

About the authors: Miguel Castrence and Bobby Lambrix are dumpster divers with a passion for repurposing.