Kai Lenny is riding a compostable surfboard printed in Santa Cruz

Kai Lenny — big-wave surfer, foil pioneer, and the person who rides Jaws and Mavericks — is now riding a surfboard printed in Santa Cruz. SwellCycle, founded by Patricio Guerrero, prints boards layer by layer from a bioplastic filament made with recycled and plant-based material. The result is hollow and compostable, and replaces the polyurethane foam blank and fibreglass skin that conventional boards are built from. Because the printer lays down only the material the structure actually needs, there is very little offcut waste. Lenny worked on the design directly and tested the finished board. His reaction afterwards was about flex rather than sustainability: the spring in it was not what he expected, and it felt strong. That is the part worth paying attention to. Compostable materials are usually sold on virtue and forgiven on performance. A board that satisfies one of the most demanding testers in the sport is a materials engineering result — and it sits a few streets from Cruz Foam on Encinal, in a genuine local cluster of people replacing petrochemical foam with something grown. Reported by Santa Cruz Works. Read the original: https://www.santacruzworks.org/news/kai-lenny-rides-swellcycle-surfboard