Can you ride a snowboard made of cardboard? In early 2014, California board maker Signal Snowboards set out to find out. The result, nicknamed the Paper Shredder, was built from recycled cardboard with packaging specialists Ernest Packaging, and it actually made it down the mountain.
Signal Snowboards and Every Third Thursday
Signal, led by Dave Lee, built a following with Every Third Thursday, a web series in which the factory crew takes on a strange board-building challenge each month. Earlier episodes had produced an all-glass snowboard and a heated board, and the series ran on Network A.
For the cardboard episode Signal teamed up with Ernest Packaging, a packaging company that works with corrugated board every day. Mike Martinez, Ernest’s director of consulting services, led the company’s side of the project. According to Ernest, the team went from challenge to a working board in just two weeks, with round after round of testing against a tight deadline.
How the cardboard snowboard was built
Simply cutting a sheet of cardboard into a board shape was never going to work. The builders layered cardboard on cardboard and added support pieces so the board could handle flex and the weight of a rider. In total they made three boards for testing:
- Board one was built with Ernest and sealed with ordinary polyurethane from a hardware store, which added some strength.
- Boards two and three used the same cardboard materials but were assembled at Signal’s factory with the resin Signal uses for its regular snowboards.
The materials were described as 100 per cent recycled cardboard, and the team put the cost at about $14 per board, not counting bindings.
The test at Copper Mountain
Riders Melissa Riitano and Morrison Hsieh took the boards to Copper Mountain in Colorado. On snow, the cardboard boards managed a few runs. The polyurethane-sealed board held up somewhat longer than the others, but none of them came close to lasting a full day of riding.
That outcome is exactly what makes the episode fun to watch. A snowboard takes constant punishment: flex through every turn, pressure on the edges, impacts in the park and hours of contact with wet snow. Cardboard handles a surprising amount of it, but water and wear win in the end.
What the Paper Shredder shows about board design
A regular snowboard is a laminated sandwich, usually a wood core wrapped in fibreglass and resin with a plastic base and steel edges. The Paper Shredder swapped the core material for recycled cardboard, and the experiment showed how much work the other layers do: Signal’s factory resin and the hardware-store polyurethane were what kept the cardboard together on snow.
Nobody expected to sell it. As New Atlas pointed out, a $14 board would still cost less than many resorts charge for a day’s rental, but the point was to test an idea and have some fun with it. Signal’s other experiments, such as the separate heated-board experiment, follow the same spirit. For another unusual technology proposal, see evaluating another technology proposal.
Related reading
- Watch This Man Snowboarding Through New York City
- B-Peg: A Snowboarding Prosthesis Tested at Val Thorens
- Ava’s Early Snowboard Ride at Mammoth
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