Reclaimed Beach Litter Used in Surfboards

Surfer and founder of Spirare Surfboards Kevin Cunningham uses sustainable materials in his designs such as recycled foam cores. His new series will incorporate reclaimed ocean trash.

Amid the beauty of ocean waves and sandy shores is an all too frequent outlier: garbage.

Surfer Kevin Cunningham spends a good deal of time near the water and reports first-hand that “the beaches we all love to visit are being plagued with trash; trash that washes up onto the shores from the massive drifts of debris in the ocean.”

But as the designer behind Spirare Surfboards, Cunningham also found himself in a position to do something about it. The avid surfer and art school graduate decided to launch a series of boards that incorporate reclaimed debris such as plastic and glass into its skin.

Examples include “plastic bags woven into a strengthening cloth; plastic bottles cut up and reassembled into fins, driftwood inlayed into intrinsic patterns, and many other possibilities,” he writes on his website.

Cunningham already produces boards with a recycled foam interior, however these new boards are still in the idea stage: the goal, with funding through Kickstarter, is to create a series of functional boards with recycled garbage that double as works of art for gallery display around the country, followed by a signed series of 100 boards for sale.

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