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Bottles in.
Boards out.

We're a new student club at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, turning discarded PET water bottles into polyurethane foam surfboard blanks — built by students, from scratch, in a campus lab.

Support the build Get involved

From landfill plastic to rideable foam

Most surfboards are already shaped from polyurethane foam — ours just starts as a water bottle instead of raw petrochemicals.

  1. 01 · Glycolysis

    Break it down

    Collected PET bottles are chemically broken down into their base building blocks in the lab.

  2. 02 · Linking

    Rebuild it

    Urea and urethane linking turns those building blocks into a polyurethane foam precursor.

  3. 03 · Foaming

    Rise and cure

    The precursor is foamed and cured into the lightweight blanks a surfboard gets shaped from.

Our goal: a working PET-to-foam blank, shaped and tested, by the end of the year.

Four teams, one board

Every board we build touches all four of these.

Foam development

Runs the lab work: synthesizing PU foam from PET waste, checking material quality with FTIR, and testing mechanical properties against industry standards.

Surfboard blank mold

Working with Cal Poly's concrete lab instructors to build the university's first surfboard blank mold.

Environmental policy

Comparing our process to current waste-management practices, studying the twelve principles of green chemistry, and building the case for real policy change.

Media and social

Beach cleanups, surf trips, bottle collection drives, fundraising, and merch.

Who's running it

We're brand new — most of us are still figuring out our own role too.

Jack Clair

Jack Clair

Co-President

Andy Clarke

Andy Clarke

Co-President

Jameson Metsch

Jameson Metsch

Research Lead

We need you

We're a brand-new club, which means almost nothing is fixed yet. Have an idea for an alternative build — resin, fins, leash, wax, wetsuits, a cork board? Bring it. Want to run your own piece of the club? There's room.

Email us to get started