ASB MAGAZINE: The team at Sanded Australia have launched a viable eco alternative to traditional surfboard cloth with a PET cloth derived from plastic bottles. Sanded Australia are the first company to weave PET into a cloth, purpose made for surfboards, without compromising strength and performance. The PET cloth is woven in Australia with the help of fibreglass partners Colan Australia.
According to Sanded’s John Dowse, “We used a private lab which has worked with big surfboard labels in the past and knew the tests we wanted, compression, flex (displacement) and failure of composites,”
“We will be using EPS/Epoxy for all our composite tests as the more technical builds in surfboards are in Epoxy/EPS. You get more consistent results as one blank might be poured differently to the next in PU.”
Sanded used a standard imported ‘baked’ E-glass to get a starting point for testing.
“The test was to determine the compression and breakage failure of the composites and to show that not all materials are the same, even in fibreglass – the Australian made ‘Direct Size’ Colan Australia E-glass showed considerable increases in strength on breakage failure.”
The results indicate that PET cloth added with both imported baked E-glass and Colan’s glass added to the breakage strength.
“If we can get some of the major labels to replace just a layer on the deck of each of their boards imagine how many bottles we can take out of the environment,” concluded Dowse.
More info https://www.sanded.com.au/collections/surfboard-reinforcements/products/pet-surfboard-cloth-3oz-made-from-recycled-plastic-bottles
