What to expect next winter: trends (going green)

There’s another trend sticking out like a sore thumb for next season, can you guess what it is?

Eco, green, carbon savers; thankfully snowboard brands in general seem to be paying attention to a growing public consensus to look after the natural world.

Even if some allusions to green and eco production processes are nothing more than marketing campaigns these small efforts are having a notable impacts on ranges of snowboards. At Dragon where a greener goggle has been launched this winter, it transpires that much of the cleaner processes used to make the green installment have been brought into action on the whole range of goggles.

The ideal is of course that ‘greener’ manufacturing and distribution processes become the norm and not the geeky installment aimed at treehuggers in the family.

Some brands like Arbor, Patagonia and Bond for instance are endeavoring to bring an ‘ecological’ awareness to their entire line, but for the most an eco board or product is enough to tick the green box.

The official line on it, from ISPO runs like this,

“The major focus for the snowboard winter 2010/2011 is on eco-friendly products. The environmental aspect is becoming more important in regards to resources as well as manufacturing. Factories use fast-growing bamboo, wood sourced from local forests or recycling materials such as paper for laminates and steel for edges. The use of resins and other toxic materials is increasingly reduced. Flow already reduces the number of prototypes built to keep to this motto. A really “green” product is one made of eco-friendly materials, and manufactured with production methods that reduce energy use and transportation distances. A good example is Amplid; wood chips created by cutting operations are used for the core, and none of the components is sourced more than 300 kilometers from the factory.”

Hand-in-hand with Weekend Snowboards goes Bond outerwear. An environmentally aware line of softgoods with recycled elements in the whole range, using Coconut of all things in the fabric. An award winner at the Slide tradeshow at the end of January this year.

In their Fast.Plant K2 have unleashed a core construction using a horizontal laminate. That in itself would be enough to save the planet as the warranty is for five years! Add that to some fast growing bamboo and it would certainly appear that in roads are being made to reduce carbon use, poor carbon.

In the Re-union Union bindings are offering a recycled baseplate with fabric contrstructed from off-cuts – this goes along way into offsetting the particularly extravagant MC (possible the most expensive binding we’ve ever seen, read all about it in Fall-Line 90 which’ll be hitting the shelves in a few weeks.)

Covering the eco-bases, Atomic are pushing their Renu range, with both the spilt Poacher and Alibi available as Renu models. The Alibi has been refined for 2011 and pushed slightly more towards the all mountains end of the spectrum, with setback bindings although still in a true twin shape. Of course, there’s a bit of rocker in there too (Atomic have two specific rockers for this winter: freestyle and freeride).