hiya wa howa aswat

Jon Pyzel was hard at work on a muggy day on the Gold Coast.
 He’d just ironed out the final details of his expanding Australian distribution strategy, and was now performing some emergency ding repair in a rented shaping bay. The object of his attention, a candy apple red 5’11″, looked as if someone had taken a hammer to it. Pressure dings from nose to tail with craters from knees and elbows and shins and heads. It looked like it’d fallen out of the plane somewhere between Hawaii and Australia.

In actuality, the board was six days old. The blame for its condition falls squarely on John Florence. “The way he surfs, we can’t make his boards super light or they’ll be destroyed immediately,” said Pyzel. “They won’t even last one session. The boards I make him are sturdier than most. He’s not going through board after board after board. He likes to keep it simple. He finds that single, go-to board, and once he has one he likes, he rides it to death.” Florence doesn’t travel with as many boards as most his peers on Tour do—many of whom will lug more than two dozen to each Tour stop. Instead, he’ll usually carry between 8 to 10, leaving room for his expensive cameras, his younger brothers, and his shaper, who comes in handy on the road.

Pyzel has known the Florences and shaped exclusively for John since he was five. He made him his first custom board, and hundreds, if not thousands, since. He describes their design dialogue as a healthy back-and-forth; ideas flow both ways until they find something that works. It’s obvious that both have benefitted from the relationship. John is shattering performance barriers every time he paddles out and Pyzel loves having such a dynamic product tester. When you’re shaping for a surfer whose talent knows no ceilings, you encounter a unique set of demands. “His quiver goes up to 6’10″ and then skips all the way to 9’6″. There’s nothing in between—real different to a lot of pros that have the full gamut of every size. He says he can ride anything on the North Shore that’s breaking on the inside reef on a 6’10″ or under, and then once you go beyond that, he goes to a whole different level. It’s crazy.”
When he’s home in Oahu, Pyzel works in the Waialua Sugar Mill, just outside of Haleiwa, an industrial zone dense with shapers, glassers, distributors, and the sort. But since Florence made the Tour in 2011, Pyzel’s international itinerary and profile has blown up. Evidently, when you shape sleds for one of the world’s best, customers notice and business booms. Pyzel’s surfboards can now be found around the world. “Every year I go to Japan, Indo, and Bali, and then Portugal twice. I go to Uruguay, and also Chile and Peru. I’m setting up a business in Brazil, and I’ve just lined up some work in the U.K.” In the last few months, California’s three major shops have placed bulk orders with Pyzel, each telling him that surfers keep coming in asking to ride what John John rides. And when it comes to what John John is riding, there’s nobody who knows more than Pyzel.

“I’ve always known he’s a special surfer. Even when he was young, I had faith that he was going to be where he is right now,” said Pyzel. “I’ve never seen it going any other way. There never seemed to be any other possible outcome. To be committed to this whole thing has been incredible for me, I’m lucky to be involved. It’s helped me out, and I know he knows that, and that I really appreciate it. I think he’s stoked to see me doing well too.”


Pyzel sees his handiwork in action on Tour, in films, in web clips and magazines, and identifies his shapes in an instant. He mentioned Florence’s December cover of SURFER, not the wave or the shot, but how he opened his mailbox and the first thing he noticed was the 6’6″ John was riding in Puerto Escondido. There aren’t many ways for a shaper to find his logo on the cover of a magazine, but putting your boards under the feet of the eldest Florence is as good a strategy as any. Despite his growing notoriety, Pyzel reiterates that their relationship and success is a two-way street: “He makes the boards look good, that’s for sure.”

The creation of one standard surfboard produces nearly 600 pounds of CO2, which is a lot considering that most boards weigh in around six pounds. In 2012, determined to find a solution to this, Michael Stewart and Kevin Whilden cofounded Waste to Waves and challenged surfers to help cut that footprint in half.
The response was extreme. Stewart and Whilden put a call out for foam waste—the kind used as packing for TVs, computers, or anything from Ikea—and they got plenty of it. Thousands of pounds of Styrofoam were collected, loaded into semis, then transported to factories to be reground and mixed into blanks. But the process was inefficient, it wasn’t cost effective, and due to the varied densities of the foam being blended, the blanks were inconsistent.
Progress, they say, often stems from necessity. So the program adapted.
Enter one industrial-grade machine and something called “foam densification.” Standard Styrofoam is 98 percent air and 2 percent plastic, but using this process you’re able to remove the air and reduce the Styrofoam waste to 1/90th of its original size. Basically, the machine allows you to transform various foam waste material into a new solid block of plastic that’s the exact same material used to create virgin EPS blanks.
Stewart and Whilden found access to a densifyer and put the compressed plastic back into the market, which Marko Foam (the leading supplier of surfboard foam in the US) now uses to make new, fresh blanks with 60 percent recycled content. Blanks that could be your next board.
“At its base, pilot level, Waste to Waves was just a Styrofoam collection and recycling program,” said Stewart. “But then we had a moment where we realized we had way more foam regrind than there’s a market for. We weren’t going to send the excess back to the landfills, so we decided to turn it all back into recycled EPS foam, and now Marko can buy as much back as the surfboard market can handle.”
Marko’s recycled blanks, called ECOBOARDS, are stamped with the green arrows and shipped out good as new to shaping bays across California as an option for anyone who wants an EPS board.
“We’re creating ways for surfers to look for a recycled label on boards that are already produced,” says Stewart, “or if they’re getting a custom from Patterson or Biolos or Stretch or Cole or any of these guys, they can simply say ‘Hey, make it with a recycled blank.’ It’s really that easy.”
Torrey Meister can vouch for how simple it is. “I was interested in finding a surfboard that was better for the environment but would still work well,” said Meister. “Waste to Waves and Marko offered to make me a blank, and I got Roberts to shape me a little groveler. Honestly, I couldn’t believe how great it worked. I had my doubts, but as soon as I got it in the water the thing went insane. I didn’t feel any kind of negative differences between the recycled blank and a normal one. If anything, I felt like the recycled blank had more pop and speed then a normal one. The potential is huge for these boards.”

All said, it remains undetermined what exactly it’ll take to encourage surfing’s masses to buy recycled. But demand runs economics, and demand is built one board at a time. “The program is in place,” said Stewart. “Now it’s really just about educating surfers that there are recycled options out there.”