Professional freeride snowboarder Cody Bramwell carves through the deep white powder. He goes left, then right, then left again, down the mountainside

This snowboard is made from paper — and it shreds like a dream

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2024-03-30 12:00:08

Professional freeride snowboarder Cody Bramwell carves through the deep white powder. He goes left, then right, then left again, down the mountainside. He’s snow surfing — a unique, bind-less style of snowboarding invented in Japan in the 1980s.

Rather than focusing on speed and tricks, snow surfing is about finding the flow of the mountain, keeping speed through flat sections and becoming one with the terrain. The sport is best practised in fresh, uncompressed powder, as opposed to crowded ski slopes.

It’s fitting then that the board Bramwell is riding was made in a way that has minimal impact on the pristine nature snow surfing depends upon. Instead of plastic or fibreglass, these snowsurfs are made from old paper.

“I wanted to challenge the status quo and inspire companies to take the step further and look at alternative materials,” says Vincent Skoglund, photographer and co-founder of Swedish audio tech darling Zound Industries (now Marshall Group), who last year founded Papersurf. Skoglund says he is struggling to keep up with orders for the boards, which start at 4495 SEK (€390).

The snowsurfs were built by PaperShell, a Stockholm-based startup that has developed a way to turn paper waste into a durable, high-tech composite it calls “wood metal.”