Surfboard & Snowboard Wax: Oops…
By Jenn (TinyChoices.com) | August 31, 2010
I recently picked up a new obsession/hobby (it’s a fine line): surfing. Add this to my love of snowboarding and nordic skiing, and I’ve now got three board sports to participate in during two seasons of the year. Lucky me!
All three of these pursuits have one main thing in common: it’s necessary to apply specialized & highly engineered wax to boards/skis. For skis & snowboards, the wax allows the planks to glide smoothly over snow, and wax on a surfboard gives the rider enough traction to stand and maneuver. In both circumstances, the wax gets rubbed off and must be regularly reapplied. I then had the kind of thought which led Karina and I to create Tiny Choices in the first place: where does that wax go when it disappears from the boards?
While I’m surfing or boarding or skiing, the wax is abraded off by snow. Eventually that snow melts, and presumably the microscopic wax particles settle down onto the mountain itself. While this may seem like a ridiculous thing to even think about, consider that skiing trails are static and generally unchanging over many, many years- so there may be decades worth of hundreds of thousands of skiers depositing petroleum-based wax onto mountains and hills all over the world. There are animals which feed on these mountains, and streams in these places which empty into rivers which empty into oceans. This is a very slippery slope, so to speak.
In the case of surfing, it’s easy to see exactly where that wax is going: right into the ocean, where it’s then absorbed by plants, coral, fish, shellfish, sharks, whales, dolphins, octopuses (octopi?), clams, lobsters, jellyfish, seahorses, and starfish.
So thus is the conundrum: being active means we’re healthier, yet activities such as Bikram yoga, surfing, skiing/snowboarding, can be taxing on the environment. Of course, my personal goal is to mitigate and minimize my impact as much as possible: when possible and safe, I buy second-hand gear, I’ll use natural-based waxes when they’re available (and a quick preliminary search shows they are), and participate in sports with as little travel-impact as possible. So it’s a funny situation: I live a car-free city-based low-impact life, but then expend greater amounts of energy in order to reach the big wide open spaces I love. Tricky situation!
How do your pastimes and pursuits and hobbies impact the environment, and what do you do to lessen the weight?
[Photo by Mike Baird via Creative Commons]
Topics: Yoga & Fitness | 3 Comments »
3 Comments
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
Interesting point! We make a boat wax that is completely biodegradable and has minimal impact on aquatic life … but no surf wax yet! Thanks for the post!
-Deb for Ecover
Deb, if Ecover makes it, the surfers will come!
I think about things like this all the time, regarding my hobby (bellydancing). A lot of what I worry about is economic, regarding the pay and working conditions of the people who craft costumes, jewelry and other items for bellydancers. I also think (and talk to other dancers) about navigating the issues of cultural appropriation, Orientalism, and privilege. The environment works into it too, such as energy used to ship items from overseas, what costumes and other dance goods are made of, and how these items are produced. I wrote a blog entry touching on these issues a few years ago:
http://right-and-kind.blogspot.com/2007/09/news-privilege-guilt.html