The “surfer’s paradox” is that their boards can harm the oceans they cherish. A new process is helping to change that.

Five years ago, Patricio Guerrero was surfing the rolling waves of Santa Cruz when the leash on his board broke, sending it flying into a nearby cave and shattering its nose. As Guerrero worked on repairs, he was shocked at how much plastic waste was building up beside him.

When the board was fixed, he loaded the plastic into the blue recycling bin outside of his house, but the next morning the bin had not been emptied. The city recycling plant wouldn’t accept the material because it was a non-recyclable kind of plastic.

“I started talking to my buddies and we realized this was an industry-wide problem. There’s so much waste generated from building surfboards,” said Guerrero, who is now CEO at Swellcycle, a Santa Cruz company that creates 3D printed surfboards from renewable materials.

Guerrero has always been interested in building environmentally friendly products. In high school, he converted a 1972 Volkswagen Beetle into an electric vehicle. Later he gained a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering and a master’s in design and manufacturing. Guerrero 3D-printed his first prototype board less than a year after his surfboard broke, marking the beginning of what would become Swellcycle, which aims to turn the tides on surfing’s harmful impact on the planet.

Traditionally, surfboards begin their lives as a large rectangular block of rigid polyurethane foam — a type of plastic made from fossil fuels that can’t be easily recycled. The blocks are carved away to form the desired surfboard shape, generating a large amount of waste.

Oil-based plastics like polyurethane are terrible for the environment. In fact, the carbon emissions from manufacturing a typical six-foot surfboard are equivalent to one person flying 1,005 miles on a long-haul flight, according to a 2022 report from Wavechanger, an Australian organization dedicated to reducing the harmful environmental impacts of surfing.

Some newer foam materials that use fewer fossil fuels have gained popularity, but these alternatives break down easily into tiny pieces of plastic that can harm ocean wildlife.

“Imagine the contents of a beanbag,” said Tom Wilson, founder of Wavechanger. “If you break a surfboard in half and rub it just slightly, the beads fall off.”

Those beads can be swallowed by seabirds and other marine animals, leading to internal injuries, intestinal blockages, and even death.

“You see photos of birds that have their stomachs opened after they pass away, and they’re full of plastic,” Wilson said.

Instead of nonrenewable materials, Swellcycle boards are built from polylactic acid (PLA), a biodegradable plastic made from fermented corn starch and sugarcane. In addition to being eco-friendly, surfboards made from PLA are stronger and lighter than typical foam boards.

To combat the waste created by the typical carving process, Swellcycle uses specialized 3D printers to print their boards with the minimum amount of PLA. The company builds its own printers — giant rectangular boxes standing taller than their operators — to methodically print the boards layer by layer.

The cores of the boards are printed using a lattice pattern, strengthening the board while keeping it light enough to maneuver easily. Once the day-long printing process is finished, the only excess material created is the support that props up the board, which the company recycles into new products.

Traditional surfboards are simply thrown away once their time is done, but with Swellcycle boards, the PLA is ground into pellets which can be used to make new products.

Every part of a Swellcycle board can be recycled, apart from the resin used to coat the boards and make them durable. When heated, resin burns instead of melting, so the Swellcycle team is now working on methods to convert excess resin into fins, which jut out on surfboards to help with steering and control.

“We used to see trash as just a problem, but trash is so precious. We can make so many things if we are creative,” said Lili Van Hassel, sustainability and operations lead at Swellcycle.

Swellcycle’s zero-waste approach combats what’s known as the “surfer’s paradox,” in which surfers, who are often avid environmentalists, actively participate in practices that harm the natural world.

“Before Swellcycle, there was a disconnect between surfers that love the ocean and want to protect it from pollution and climate change, but the equipment that they were riding was directly contributing to the very thing they’re trying to prevent,” Guerrero said.

The true test for a surfboard is how it performs on the waves, however. At one of the company’s “demo days” in October, where local surfers tested out the boards for the first time in Santa Cruz, they held their own.

“It was very cool. I like that it was stiff, had a lot of drive, and went fast,” said Jason Glickman, a Santa Cruz resident who has been surfing for more than 30 years.

Ricardo Urbinas, another local surfer, urged the surfing community to take a more active part in protecting the oceans that they love.

“We really have to be good stewards of the ocean,” Urbinas said. “As much as we like to surf, I think we all understand some of the impact that building surfboards has.”

Swellcycle’s boards were recently named “Earth & Sea Invention of the Year” by the Seymour Marine Discovery Center at UC Santa Cruz. Guerrero hopes that other sports manufacturing companies beyond surfing see Swellcycle’s success as a blueprint of how to reduce the environmental impact of equipment production.

“Our wish is that people are excited about this as we are and we can do this all over the world,” Guerrero said.