“We are extremely excited to launch the worlds first snowboard recycling program. A new technology that recycles dead snowboards and up-cycles the materials. Making boards from boards.”
Absolutely love this groundbreaking new recycle/up-cycle program by Jones Snowboards that is capable of reusing approximately 95% of almost any board ever made. Jones is looking for a steady supply of “dead snowboards” and if you ship a retired board back to them you’ll receive a $50 credit towards the purchase of a new Jones board.
“We will provide a pre-paid shipping label at no cost to customers in the continental United States and select European countries to ship boards back to us for recycling. To receive a shipping label, fill out the return form here.”
DOPE! For more info on this fantastic program GO HERE:
Introducing a new technology that recycles dead snowboards and upcycles the materials.
How do you make a new snowboard from a dead, broken or defective snowboard? It’s a question we’ve asked ourselves since we started making snowboards.
Because if a snowboard could be recycled, not only would it save materials, but it would reduce its overall carbon footprint by eliminating “end-of-life” impacts.
Tossing a dead board in the landfill has a measurable carbon footprint that we calculated in 2020 when we completed a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of our snowboard production. The LCA measured the approximate carbon impact of every stage of a Jones board’s lifecycle – from sourcing raw materials, to manufacturing, to shipping, to throwing a board in the trash.
Over 1,000,000 snowboards have been produced each year since 1995. Where do they all go?
With few exceptions, most skis and snowboards end up in the landfill. Re-Up Tech is part of the solution.
We are always looking for ways to reduce our impact, so we got serious about finding a solution to this snowboard recycling challenge after finding out the “end-of-life” impacts from the LCA. Learning from dead ends, and doubling down on successes, we are ecstatic to announce that our relentless experimenting has finally paid off!
Introducing Jones Re-Up Tech – the world’s first snowboard recycling program that collects dead snowboards and re-uses the board materials to make new boards using a groundbreaking reclamation process.
How Re-Up Tech works.
One of the many reasons Re-Up Tech is so exciting is that it brings “circularity” to the ski and snowboard industry by eliminating waste and circulating old materials into new products.
The Re-Up process is capable of reusing approximately 95% of almost any snowboard ever made. The ingenious nature of the technology allows us to recycle snowboards of any brand, model or year and use the materials to make new Jones boards.
Step 1
Collect boards, ship them back to factory
The Re-Up process begins by collecting warranty boards and retired boards from riders and shops around the world. The dead boards are then shipped to our factory using ocean freight. Shipping them back on a slow boat has the smallest carbon footprint possible, and the benefits of recycling still significantly outweigh this unavoidable impact.
When the retired boards arrive at the factory they begin the recycling process along with a small number of defective ‘C’ grade’ Jones boards that got rejected at some stage in the manufacturing process. The ability to recycle factory rejects is another huge benefit of Re-Up Tech.
Step 2
Prepare the boards for recycling
Once back at the factory, the recycling process begins by sanding every board’s topsheet and base to remove any dirt, wax, or solvents. The next step is to remove the steel edges and steel inserts using a mechanical process. The edges and inserts are then set aside to be recycled with other scrap steel.
Without the edges and inserts, the board is now a sandwich of p-tex, epoxy, wood core, stringer material and topsheet. This metal-free sandwich is then flattened in a press to remove any rocker profile or 3D contours.
Step 3
Make a six board sandwich and slice it up
Six flattened boards of any brand or material composition are then stacked, glued and pressed together to create a 24 layer thick sandwich of snowboard materials. The sandwich includes six layers of p-tex, six layers of wood core, six layers of stringers and six layers of topsheet material.
The sandwich is then cut into thin slices that include all 24 layers of recycled material. These thin slices are what gets used in the construction of new
Re-Up Tech wood cores.
Step 4
Insert the slices into new wood cores
The thin slices of recycled material are then inserted into new wood cores in the place of a traditional stringer material. Because the layers in the slice are oriented at 90 degrees relative to the word core, base and topsheet, they offer remarkable dampening and stiffening properties. In both factory and on-snow tests, these slices of compressed recycled materials proved to be some of the highest performance stiffening materials we’ve ever tested.
By using only thin slices of each recycled board, the effects of material variability are negated. It doesn’t matter if one board had a faster base + carbon stringers and another board did not. In testing, the performance of any slice, no matter its composition, is virtually identical. The recycled materials are also only used in specific areas which account for around 20% of the wood core. 80% of the core is still made with responsibly harvested virgin wood like a traditional wood core.
