Greening up for the deep blue sea
SURFING is where all the natural elements combine – sun, wind, white foam, the green ocean.
For Organic Dynamic’s Jack Candlish, his love of the sport inspired him to come up with a more sustainable way of riding the waves.
Candlish, who studied industrial design at Massey University from 2005 to 2009, has only recently started making surfboards fulltime. Prior to that he juggled their manufacture around his commitments at his furniture and cabinetry business in Berhampore.
‘‘I’ve always been a surfer,’’ he says of the activity that gave him a huge appreciation of nature by literally dumping him right in it from time to time.
‘‘But I got a bit busy when I was studying for my industrial design degree – I didn’t do any physical activity for about 4 years. And then I set up my own business and that was another three years of just working.’’
Candlish says he finally got back into the water about four years ago and started making boards soon afterwards.
‘‘Mainly because I was breaking them, and having to repair them,’’ he says. ‘‘I’ve learned how to handle them better now but early on I kept messing them up on rocks, and those foam boards are pretty delicate.’’
Candlish soon discovered a more worrying aspect.
‘‘It wasn’t until I started actually cutting into the boards and finding out what materials I needed to buy to patch up the dents that I realised what they were made from,’’ he says.
‘‘And then over the years I learnt how harmful those materials could be. Polyurethane foam and polyester resin are two of the most toxic and most environmentally unfriendly materials around.’’
That didn’t sit easy with Candlish who says surfing had given him a whole new appreciation of nature and the environment. The signwriting company he set up after leaving university had also caused him a degree of inner conflict.
‘‘We were using lots of vinyl type graphics and I was really aware of the waste we were producing,’ he says. ‘‘There’s so much wastage involved – with every sticker that ends up on a car there’s a vinyl perimeter that goes into the bin, and there’s the backing paper and the masking paper – so I was having all these dilemmas around that. That’s when I started going more on the timber side of things.’’
With a passion for timber, and a workshop full of woodworking machinery, Candlish started a new company, called Proffer, and began making furniture and cabinetry. An additional upside was he was well placed to start developing a more sustainable, timber-based surfboard in his spare time.
Initial experiments were encouraging. Using sustainably grown plywood imported from Italy over a chambered timber interior, Candlish produced a board that wasn’t any heavier than conventional models but bounced back after hitting the rocks. The market was impressed but there was a problem.
‘‘The supply of the plywood ran out. No one was bringing it into New Zealand,’’ Candlish explains. ‘‘I could import it myself but I’d have to buy half a container at a time, and that’s a lot of surfboards!
Looking round for locally-grown alternatives, Candlish started experimenting with paulownia, a common boat building material that is almost as light as balsa wood but much stronger.
‘‘It comes from a guy in the Waikato who grows it on his dairy farm,’’ Candlish says. ‘‘His cows roam in-between the rows of trees – the roots stop the excrement getting into the streams and the trees grow faster.’’ It was a sustainability win/win, he says.
But the new timber didn’t work as well with the hollow construction technique as it wasn’t strong enough to span the gaps in the boards, so Candlish looked at using recycled polystyrene.
‘‘I was getting old packaging, cutting it up and putting it in the boards, and that was working,’’ he says. ‘‘Then I found these guys at the tip at Porirua who were taking polystyrene waste, mulching it up and remoulding it in big blocks - so I tried that.’’
(‘‘These guys’’ are Richard Moore and his team at Poly Palace – their recycled polystyrene blocks is also being used as roading fill, notably on the Peka Peka Expressway.)
Candlish cuts planks from the foam slabs and, using a machine he designed himself, shapes each one and sandwiches it between layers of Innegra fibre composite topped with the timber outer.
‘‘It’s all made out of waste polystyrene and NZ grown timber,’’ Candlish says proudly. ‘‘The boards are a lot tougher on the outside, but the challenge has been to keep the weight the same – and I’m pretty much there. A normal board weighs in at 3 kg and mine will be about 3.4.’’
Already Candlish’s boards have been recognised by the not-forprofit Sustainable Surf organisation, which awards certification to companies meeting certain sustainability criteria, but Candlish wants to go further.
‘‘I’ve got eco-board standard, but I’m trying to get the next level which is the gold level one, but getting there really pushes the boundaries of what you can do,’’ he says.
And he’s looking at further opportunities for machinery he’s developed. An automated rocker cradle can set the curve of the board and assemble all the parts in a fraction of the time of current methods, and to a greater degree of accuracy.
‘‘I can have all the profiles and data on my tablet, send them to the machine and it takes a about five minutes before I’m good to go on the next board,’’ Candlish says. ‘‘If I was making jigs for each board I’d be looking at a minimum of an hour for each one.’’
Now that his hobby, is finally making him some money, he says, the next step is to build a ‘‘nice’’ version of the machine and get a patent.
‘‘It can be adapted for snowboards and skis, so I’d like to sell it to other manufacturers – perhaps do a licensing approach with other board makers around the world. I’ve got a lot invested in the machinery so I’m hoping to get that international thing go.’’