New life for skateboards
It used to be that when a skateboard had shredded its last empty pool or hopped its last handrail, it took a one-way trip to the great halfpipe in the sky.
But thanks to a Long Beach-based company called Art of Board, there’s now new life for some of the battered and broken slabs. Wooden skateboard decks — in all their scuffed, gouged and worn glory — are finding new uses in board shorts, T-shirts, hats, socks, pillows, wallets and a range of flooring and wall tiles.
Through its “I Ride, I Recycle” program, Art of Board collects broken wooden skateboard decks from 400 skate/surf shops, skate parks and the like from New York City to Los Angeles. To date, co-founder and Vice President Bruce Boul estimates AOB has recycled about 50,000 skate decks and diverted thousands of pounds of material from landfills.
The 7-year-old company began in the Pennsylvania basement of Rich Moorhead, whose “aha” moment came from considering the pile of destroyed and discarded wooden decks generated by his nephew. After trying his hand at turning the material into picture frames, mirrors and the occasional table, Moorhead started thinking about how to use the resulting jumble of smaller castoff pieces. That’s when his tile concept was born.
The colorful tiles are hand cut from seven-ply laminated maple skate decks and sold mesh-mounted by the square foot.
Boul says Art of Board’s tile and tile prints have been popular not just in the home setting but in business environments as well. Google and Monster Energy have created entire walls in their corporate offices using the tile. Hyundai used sheets of the tiles to line the cargo area in a Southern California-themed concept car that was on display at the L.A. Auto Show.
In addition to the tiles, the laminated wood is cut into a range of home goods, including house numbers and letters, floor mats, drink coasters and state-shaped wall hangings.
More recently, Art of Board has added trucker hats and six-panel caps with skate tile mosaic prints. Men’s and women’s recycled-polyester board shorts emblazoned with tile patterns were added to the mix last month, and a collection of comfy, couch-appropriate throw pillows is due out later this month. Art of Board’s full line of products (prices range from $6 for a key chain to $230 for a “fun box” of tiles) is available through McGill’s Skateshop in Encinitas and online at www.artofboard.com.
Next on deck? A partnership with Colorado-based Coalatree Organics will add T-shirts and organic cotton socks printed with skate tile imagery to the merchandise mix later this spring.
But it’s a product in the pipeline for this summer that truly closes the sustainability loop: a collaboration with Penny Skateboards that puts Art of Board’s graphics on Penny’s Organic line of plastic skate decks that contain special enzymes to help break down and biodegrade a board when buried in soil.
How meta — in an eco-friendly way.
