Jaguar Land Rover and SkunkWorks Surf Co have partnered in an initiative to build surfboards from the car manufacturer’s polyurethane plastic used in its early design clay models.

JLR’s ‘Waste to Wave’ project takes the polyurethane foams that sits beneath clay models and repurposes it as part of the company’s commitment to send no waste to landfill by 2020.

The very first surfboard was created from a Discovery Sport clay model that was broken down in June 2017. Wheels spoke to SkunkWorks’ Ashley Douglas, who was displaying the first board concepts at Jaguar’s Tech Fest in London. “We’ve created a range of high-end custom boards. With the denser foams we can build heavier boards for big wave surfing and the lighter PU materials are used for longboards and stand-up paddleboards,” he said. “We can tune the characteristics of each board with carbon-fibre stringers exactly to clients’ needs.”

“It saves around 20 tonnes per year from going to landfill and we can make almost a thousand boards from that,” he explained.

50 percent of the aluminium used in the F-Pace is recycled and as a result of its recycling initiative, in 2016, the press shop’s aluminium waste was repurposed to provide enough material (50,000 tonnes) to build 200,000 Jaguar XE body shells. That in turn prevented more than half a million tonnes of carbon dioxide from being released to the atmosphere.

Custom boards range from $1300-$3250 dependent on build/artwork requirements etc. For more details contact www.skunkworkssurf.co.uk