If you’ve driven along the shores of Lake Michigan this winter, you may have come across some hardy surfers enjoying peak season for freshwater surfing. Local surfer and Greenhouse Surfboards founder Ken Cole took his passion for surfing beyond getting out on the water. He’s created the world’s first leaf-based surfboard to encompass what he believes is the art, soul and sustainable future of surfing.
Cole's board has been six years in the making, following a lot of trial and error and help from his community. Cole is featured in this month’s issue of Milwaukee Magazine, and he joined Lake Effect's Audrey Nowakowski to share more about all the efforts that went into the eco-friendly surfboard.
"[My goal was] to find a way to have a board that captures the beauty of surfing while also respecting the water you surf in," Cole says. "It's impossible to accomplish that if you're riding on foam."
As surfing evolved into a commercial industry in the U.S. and Australia in the 1950s and 60s, styrofoam-based surfboards replaced the traditional wooden boards used by indigenous African and Pacific Island peoples, according to Cole. Although styrofoam is easy to work with and makes for ultra-light boards that glide through the water easily, it's non-biodegradable and made from fossil fuels.
"So, my initial iteration was to see what I could do to depart from that, and it was very minor," Cole says. "So, basically, what I began to do was wrap the boards in jute, or coffee bags."
Bound together with a plant-based resin and utilizing recycled wood materials, the first prototype still relied on a styrofoam core. Inspiration struck, however, when Cole was attending a birthday party,
"A friend of mine, Tom, was having a backyard birthday party for his daughter and he distributes this dish ware made of palm leaves," he says.
Inspired by a palm plate in the garbage, Cole developed his own palm-leaf composite material comparable to plywood. He used the composite to replace a traditional styrofoam core by constructing jute rails to make sure the board would hold its truss structure and be buoyant in the water.
"What you have is a surfboard that's made out of those three ingredients: a plant-based resin, jute and then the palm leaf," he says.
While on an outing in Door County, Cole's design caught the attention of fellow surfer and Milwaukee School of Engineering Professor Dr. Michael Seviere, who eventually invited Cole to the lab to develop his idea further with the help of some other MSOE engineers.
"[Through] just a confluence of great ideas and people being open-minded, we had a chance to meet with several folks there, and they offered up their services to meet with guy who had an idea," Cole says.
Trained as a clinical psychologist, Cole considers surfboard shaping to be a hobby — a supplement to his practice. But he’s curious to see if others with more time and resources might be able to develop additional uses for his palm leaf composite as a plywood alternative.
"The way that I look at it is not everybody surfs, but everybody sits. And this composite can be used to make a flat back chair, let's say, it can be used to make a table. Yes, there's limits but it can be used for that purpose," Cole explains. "So it's kind of interesting how you go from this thought that happens in a guy's backyard, to these iterations in a basement, to MSOE engineers working with it to this finished product — that kind of proves that if this complex structure that has to undergo quite a bit of pressure and the struggles of being in the water, what else could be done with that?"
He also hopes to inspire people to come up with other do-it-yourself solutions that might slow the effects of climate change. “I don’t think you have to look far to recognize that the realities of climate are unflinching and they’re devastating, and my belief has been that people are relying on resources that are finite and we're relying on what's been provided to us as solutions," Cole says. "And we're very, very close to recognizing that we can wait for engineers and scientists to come up with this, but some of them are funded by folks that aren't going to push this kind of innovation, or we can do it ourselves and hope that people catch on."
