In a nod to his New England roots, late last year New Hampshire-based surfer/snowboard builder Korey Nolan put the final touches on a surfboard made almost entirely from an unlikely material – Dunkin’ Donuts coffee cups. At the risk of stating what you’re already thinking, the craft gives new meaning to the idea of “running on Dunkin’.”
According to a post on Instagram showing the build, Nolan used over 700 EPS coffee cups from the New England-based national coffee and donut chain and 30 plastic straws went into the fins. He also used entropy super sap epoxy, fiberglass cloth, and spare bamboo from snowboard builds.
“I have been preparing for this contest since last November when I began to collect coffee cups and plastic straws myself, but mostly from friends and family,” said Nolan on an Instagram post from last September. “It came to be in the wake of last year’s contest, and inspiration drawn from [Taylor Lane], and his winning cigarette butt surfboard. It didn’t take long to decide on coffee cups as a material, as there is a Dunkin’ Donuts at every intersection in New England, but I knew I’d need time to collect enough for this project. I also needed time to devise how I would most ecologically cobble all of them together into a shapable blank. After much testing of adhesives and methods, I adapted a concept often used in snowboard crafting by building a mold from recycled materials from my snowboard press and the sign shop I work at to compress the cups together with epoxy. I also used a flexible silicone heat blanket for snowboard building to flash cure the epoxy in 40 minutes. After weeks of pressing, and much help and patience from my wife… I finally had a blank to work with. It was comprised of roughly 2,800 chunks of cups, 700 cups in total. I then sandwiched between them, an off-cut of bamboo plywood I had from snowboard builds to use as a stringer.”
Nolan’s build, dubbed the “Yewlatta,” is a powerful statement on American throw-away culture. According to Ocean Conservancy data, foam cups and takeout containers are among the most common items found in beach cleanups around the world. And polystyrene (extruded polystyrene or XPS is the more technical term for Styrofoam) is only recycled at a rate of about 12 percent.
There are efforts to remedy that in surf – especially since, well, surfboards are made of foam. California-based Marko Foam, for instance, created their Waste to Waves program that uses packing foam to create Enviro-foam surfboard blanks that are about 25 percent recycled content.
Dunkin’ is reportedly considering moving to a more sustainable option and has already made the switch to paper cups in towns that have outlawed polystyrene.
