Back in June we funded a project that we’d love to share with you (yes, the Awesome Foundation Sydney folks are busy…better late than never, right?!). It’s all about shredin’ sustainably, and by shredin’ we’re talking high performance surfing. Our recipient Chris Anderson is a keen surfer from a scenic coastal town called Minnamurra, known for its ‘devilish’ reef breaks,

“I have a passion for design and high performance surfing as it is pretty dam awesome – big airs, gnarly waves, fast spins, shredding turns and of course, insane wipeouts. High performance surfboards need to cope with many bashings whilst also needing to be very lightweight. The result is that they often snap straight in half when under high pressure.

As surfers churn through multiple boards a year they are also churning through many nasty resources. Just one board uses around 2L of petroleum, which is combined with other toxic chemicals to create EPS (expanded polystyrene) a horrible pollutant that takes decades to rot in land fill – stuff that is ultimately ruining the environment we love to play in.”

His solution to this problem is to prototype a new kind of surfboard, one that uses sustainable materials but doesn’t trade off other considerations like great design, strength and performance. The details of this are, for now, patent pending, so we can’t give away too many of his secrets but I can tell you that he and his mates are going to be, in his words, “surfing the hell out of” the prototypes once they are in the world. Suffice to say, we think Chris is onto a great thing, and we can’t wait to see what he’s come up.