How green is your board?
footprint of a Jones board.
End-of-life
When all goes as planned, you get to watch a snowboard age gracefully over multiple seasons.
The edges slowly round over and gouges gradually pinstripe the entire base until the board is a performance liability and demands retirement.
But as many of us know all too well, the life of a snowboard doesn’t always go according to plan. Some boards die tragically young, with a base like a baby face, broken by one wrong move, or a violent encounter with a rock or rail.
Either way, whether a board dies young or old, it’s inevitable. If you consistently ride a snowboard, one day it’s life as a fun loving, functional shred stick will be over.
In 2020 we completed a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) that calculated the approximate carbon footprint of every snowboard and splitboard model we sell. This in-depth sustainability analysis covered the complete life cycle of a Jones board, including every stage of its production, distribution and retirement, or in sustainability terms, it’s end-of-life.
What happens to a board when you retire it from action is an important life stage to consider because the path it takes at the end-of-life affects its overall carbon footprint.
The environmental costs of dumping a board in the landfill versus burning it in an incinerator or turning the board into a bench are all different.
After sharing the effects of materials and shipping on a Jones board’s carbon footprint, the next LCA results we have to present break down the differences in environmental impact between two common end-of-life scenarios.
End-of-life waste scenarios
To analyse what happens to most retired boards in the USA, Russia and Asia, we calculated the impact of throwing a board in the landfill. This scenario will be referred to as the Landfill waste method.
For Europe, where most garbage is incinerated and any recyclable materials are collected in the process, we calculated an impact based on splitting a snowboard up into individual components, some of which are incinerated, while others are recycled or landfilled. This scenario will be referred to as the Mixed Disposal waste method. This method assumes that 100% of the steel edges are recycled, 100% of the fiberglass is landfilled and what’s left is incinerated.
The cost of burying a board
Landfill scenario: USA, Russia, Asia
When a snowboard is disposed of via landfill, the environmental repercussions are a bit more complex than you might expect. As far as the carbon footprint of landfilling a snowboard goes, the impact is pretty minimal. The only carbon emissions it takes to throw a board in the pile are from the machinery at the landfill.
The average CO2 impact of tossing a snowboard in the landfill is .403 Kg CO2 eq.
The very small amount of CO2 emissions generated by landfilling does not represent the total environmental cost of dumping a board, however. There are other costs of burying garbage that affect the planet such as soil acidification, freshwater toxification and agricultural land occupation.
Using Ecochain’s LCA analysis tools we also investigated these hidden environmental costs, plus several other criteria to assign an Environmental Price to the Landfill waste method. This price is expressed in Euro and reflects the monetary cost of cleaning up the negative effects of the landfill on the planet.
The average Environmental Price of landfilling a snowboard is 0.04 Euro.
Once again, the impact of burying a board on the planet is not massive, but is there a better waste solution? Let’s look at the Mixed Disposal waste method that represents the average waste stream in Europe to find out.
The cost of burning a board
Mixed disposal scenario: Europe
In countries like the Netherlands and Switzerland, it is forbidden to put any material in the landfill that could otherwise be incinerated or recycled. These regulations help minimize the land use and pollution of a landfill.
What happens when you throw away a snowboard in these European countries is that it gets burned using a special incineration system that can pull out a percentage of certain materials from the ashes and recycle them. In the case of incinerating a snowboard, meaningful amounts of steel can be recycled. The incineration process completely burns up the resin, wood and plastic. The ash that is left after incineration is the amount of material that ends up in the landfill - mostly fiberglass.
This is why we call it a Mixed Disposal waste method. Some of the board is incinerated, some of the board is recycled, and some of the board ends up in the landfill.
5.37
Kg CO2 eq.
The average CO2 impact of the Mixed Disposal of a snowboard
7.49
Kg CO2 eq.
The average CO2 impact of the Mixed Disposal of a splitboard
Incinerating the resin and plastic components of a snowboard contribute the vast majority of the total CO2 emissions. Incinerating resin generates 2.49 Kg CO2 eq and incinerating the plastic generates 2.72 Kg CO2 eq.
Compared to the carbon cost of incinerating the resin and plastic, recycling the steel, landfilling the fiberglass and incinerating the wood accounts for a comparatively small impact - 0.16 Kg CO2 eq in total.
If you look only at CO2 emissions, the Landfill method is much better than the Mixed Disposal method. But what that comparison doesn’t take into account is that the Mixed Disposal method also produces useful energy, heat and recycled materials from the incineration. If you subtract the CO2 savings generated by energy and material production from the CO2 impact of incineration, the impact of the Mixed Disposal method is a lot lower. The Mixed Disposal method ends up producing just slightly more overall CO2 emissions than the Landfill method.
The average carbon negative effects of Mixed Disposal are -4.51 Kg CO2 eq.
Substracting the carbon savings from the carbon emissions, the overall CO2 impact of the Mixed Disposal of a snowboard is 0.86 Kg CO2 eq.
5.37
Kg CO2 eq.
CO2 emissions of Mixed Disposal of a snowboard
4.51
Kg CO2 eq.
CO2 savings of Mixed Disposal of a snowboard
0.86
Kg CO2 eq.
Total CO2 impact of Mixed Disposal of a snowboard
This shows that it is slightly more advantageous to landfill a snowboard than to incinerate it as far as climate impact goes.
0.403
Kg CO2 eq.
Landfill
0.86
Kg CO2 eq.
Mixed Disposal
Using the same cost minus savings formula, a very similar result appears when calculating the Environmental Price of the Mixed Disposal method.
0.39
Euro
Average Environmental Price of Mixed Disposal
0.45
Euro
Average Environmental Price savings of Mixed Disposal
- 0.06
Euro
Total Environmental Price of Mixed Disposal
This shows that the Mixed Disposal method actually generates income instead of costing money like the Landfill method.
- 0.04
Euro
Landfill
- 0.06
Euro
Mixed Disposal
It’s a complex comparison, but in both regards the Mixed Disposal method used in Europe and the Landfill method used in the USA, Russia and Asia have a very similar footprint both in terms of carbon cost and environmental price.
The global average end-of-life CO2 impact
As waste methods vary so much country to country, it is very difficult to calculate the global average CO2 emissions generated by throwing away a snowboard or splitboard. The tricky part is that in countries that use the Mixed Disposal method the energy and recycled materials that are generated offset some of the end-of-life CO2 emissions, but in countries that use the Landfill method there are no carbon savings. That said, here’s what our best estimates suggest:
13,982
Kg CO2 eq.
The total annual CO2 impact of incinerating Jones boards in Europe
10,863
Kg CO2 eq.
The total annual CO2 impact of landfilling Jones boards in North America, Russia and Asia
Compared to the materials that a snowboard is built with and transporting those materials plus finished products, end-of-life has a relatively small effect on a snowboard’s overall CO2 impact.
Only 4% of a snowboard’s overall CO2 emissions are produced in the end-of-life stage of its life cycle.
Circularity is the answer
While that 4% of overall CO2 emissions may not seem very consequential, it is an important target for our CO2 emissions reductions because it’s a percentage that could be eliminated by making the snowboard industry more circular. The goal of circularity is to eliminate the waste impacts of a retired snowboard down to zero by recycling. In a 100% efficient circular industry, all retired products are turned into other products or resources and no energy is lost or waste is created.
With the current state of snowboard material and recycling technology, one of our only means of recycling retired boards as a company is to make them into skateboards.
Upcycling trash snowboards with NoK Boards
We send all of our European warranty boards and factory third boards to NoK, an upcycling company in Grenoble, France that specializes in making skateboards out of reject boards. NoK cuts skateboards out of the middle of a snowboard and then installs new trucks, wheels and griptape. You can find out more about NoK in our recent Jones Journal story.
In the future we hope to improve the circularity of our industry by collecting retired boards and recycling them into new snowboards. Splitting a broken snowboard into its individual components and recycling them is not currently possible at scale, but with advancements in resin and recycling technology, and it will hopefully be a reality soon. If we could harvest steel edges and p-tex bases from an unrideable snowboard and use them for a new snowboard this would amount to a massive saving in carbon emissions.
Repair
There are a lot of ways we, as snowboarders, can lower the environmental impact of our boards at the end of their lives, however. The first thing you should question is whether or not your snowboard is really ready for retirement?
If your snowboard’s base is scratched or the edges are dull, get it repaired instead. You’d be surprised how much edge and base damage can be repaired by a professional ski/snowboard tune shop. With a base grind and some TLC, many seemingly dead snowboards can be brought back to life. Get in touch with your local shop.
Resell
If you’re not satisfied with your old snowboard’s performance there’s a chance that someone else might not feel the same way. Try selling your used snowboard before you resort to throwing it away.
Upcycle
Feeling creative? Why not upcycle your retired board into something else that’s useful or artistic? Jones employees have upcycled retired boards to build tables, benches, truck camper shells and even high ropes course obstacles. When you upcycle a snowboard you are contributing to our goal of making the snowboard business a more circular industry.
While it’s never fun to see a snowboard grow old, the reality comes with an opportunity to make a difference.
Regardless of where you live, do whatever you can to cut down on the CO2 emissions of your snowboard by riding it for as long as you can, repairing it before replacing it, and turning your board into something rad when it’s finally time to retire.
Next up, learn about how the different stages of a snowboard’s life cycle add up to its overall carbon footprint and environmental price in part five of the ‘How Green Is Your Board?’ series.
Source Information:
This story uses data generated by Ecochain, our partner from the Netherlands who helped us analyze the life cycle and calculate the carbon footprint of a Jones snowboard. Ecochain uses the ecoinvent database and the ReCiPe calculation method for their analysis. If you have any questions about the results presented in this story, feel free to contact us at [email protected]
