Here's something you don't see every day: a surfboard made of discarded cigarette butts. Over 10,000 of them, apparently. Taylor Lane, a surfer from Southern California, recently entered the annual Vissla Creators & Innovators Upcycle Contest, a project designed to create useful products from discarded and littered items. Suffice to say, he claimed first prize with his innovative entry, which he calls the Roach Tail.
It's not made entirely of cigarettes, of course. Taylor also made use of EPS rail cut-offs, discarded fibreglass cut-offs, styrofoam fish coolers and other found fabrics. That's still extremely impressive, even if it does way a whopping 17 pounds, or just under 8kg.
"Cigarette butts are such a polluted object, so we thought it would make an interesting statement to make some article of surf craft from them – just to really address the issue of pollution", Lane explains in the video above.
Michael Ciaramella of Stab Magazine headed out to test Lane's board, and came away extremely impressed with its performance in the water. You can see the session in the above video, where Michael explains his thoughts on the Roach Tail further. Big ups to Taylor for executing this project so well – we look forward to seeing what else he can come up with in the future!
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