Borealis delivers on promise of sustainable snowboards with the use of sicomin’s greenpoxy®
Borealis Snowboards is a French snowboard brand created in 2013 by Ben Hall, a snowboard enthusiast who grew up in the mountains around Geneva. With more than 30 years’ experience riding in the French Alps and other mountains, Borealis is proud to offer a diverse range of snowboards and split boards, each with their unique identity and style, that have been designed and developed with their rider’s specfic needs in mind.
Since the launch of Borealis Snowboards , the company has committed to delivering boards with amazing performance whilst ensuring that the boards are also built with minimum negative impact on the environment. Six years later, this promise has been delivered, with Borealis boards now using a massive range of sustainable and reduced impact raw materials including natural bamboos, DNA Bioplastic Topsheets and FSC® certified wooden cores.
With regards to resins, Borealis use Sicomin’s GreenPoxy®33 – a clear system formulated especially for compression moulding techniques.
Sicomin’s GreenPoxy® products range from 28% to 52% bio content with GreenPoxy®33 containing 35% plant and vegetable matter. All the GreenPoxy® products are certified by the American BETA laboratory and French CNRS and tested in accordance with Carbon 14 measurements (ASTM D6866 or XP CEN/TS 16640).
An interview with Benjamin Hall – Founder of Borealis :
What are your main motivations to using more environmentally friendly materials?
The use of sustainable materials with less impact on the environment is one of the brand’s founding pillars. Indeed when I launched Borealis in 2013, it was one of the conditions that I had imposed on myself to produce snowboards. Humanity is at a turning point of its evolution; two hundred years aſter the industrial revolution, resources are dwindling, birds are disappearing from our skies, insects are becoming increasingly rare and the global ambient temperature continues to increase. We must adapt and change our production and consumption patterns, to find a sustainable balance with our environment.
Are Borealis riders sensitive to your approach?
Absolutely. Our riders spend a lot of time in the mountains and are sensitive to climate change. Twenty years ago, snowfalls were much heavier and more regular, throughout the winter. Today we can see episodes of intense cold and precipitation followed by long periods of drought which make the snowpack
more and more unstable, causing more and more avalanches and gradually modifying the ecosystem of mountains. Representing a brand that positively engages in the use of alternative materials to reduce its impact on the environment is something of which our riders are quite proud.
Would you be ready to participate in field trials of 100% bio based resins in development at Sicomin ?
Of course! Just let us know when!
