Seaweed is a harmful material in the oceans, but Charlie found a way to recycle them. He made a surfboard made from seaweed to protect our ocean.
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00:00The surfboard industry on a whole is not so great for the environment.
00:07Polystyrene is made from harmful oils, so my surfboards are made from seaweed and the
00:11seaweed replaces the polystyrene foam inside the surfboard.
00:19My name's Charlie Cadden, I'm 19 from Jersey and I make surfboards from seaweed.
00:27On the south coast of Jersey we have a problem in summer with sea lettuce, which is an invasive
00:31species of seaweed.
00:32Sea lettuce kind of harms the environment, it cloaks the seagrass and harms the ecosystem
00:36in that sense.
00:37So I was trying to experiment with different things to deal with that and managed to make
00:41a surfboard kind of out of it.
00:44So when making the surfboards, the process started with drying the sea lettuce in a mould.
00:50From there it provides rigid sheets, a bit like paper mache.
00:53Obviously they dissolve in water, so they're shaped and they're cut into little ribs and
00:57stringers and they're a bit like a hollow surfboard and then there's the same amount
01:01of fiberglass on top as a normal board, so the seaweed just completely replaces the foam.
01:05So the first board was a little heavy, a little bit wonky, so now the boards are made from
01:10like a seaweed foam, which the seaweed is dried and crushed into a powder, mixed with
01:15a few household kind of ingredients such as vinegar.
01:21Making it more consistent would be the next step, and predictable so that people would
01:24actually want to use it as an alternative, you'd find it consistent and almost the same
01:28to use as polyurethane and polystyrene foam, hopefully make it feel good under the surface
01:33as well.