Radical… design student makes skateboards from bags

A design student at Brunel University has built a press to turn plastic shopping bags into skateboards.

Industrial Design and Technology student Jason Knight, 22, believes that recycling could become a fun, more attractive, activity if the waste can be turned into something constructive for young people with a tangible personal reward.

Skateboard decks are traditionally made from plywood, most often taken from Canadian maple trees, and are one of the biggest causes of maple deforestation. Pro-skateboarders can go through dozens of decks a year, and young fans can find the cost of replacing their boards prohibitive.

Knight hopes that independent skate shops and other local businesses could ultimately set up their own recycling centres, allowing people to use the machine with their own collected waste plastic. The waste plastic would gain a new purpose, and the personal cost of buying a new deck (typically around £40-£60) would be reduced.

He began experimenting with recycling plastics two years ago, melting bags made from high-density polythene. Once heated to 130C, the plastic becomes soft and malleable like clay and reduces in size as particles melt together. Sustained pressure moulds it into a solid object and, with air pockets removed, creates an incredibly strong material with a multi-coloured surface finish resembling marble.

During a placement year, Knight worked at FabLab at Roskilde University in Denmark, to build a plastic shredding machine. He exhibited the shredder at a number of music and art festivals in 2016 and ran plastic recycling workshops, helping festival-goers melt and mould bags into hard plastic bottle openers.

For his final year university project – set to be exhibited from 15-18 June as part of the annual Made in Brunel showcase – he designed an easy-to-use, compact, and relatively inexpensive press and a range of prototype boards.

Experienced skateboarders have described the decks as more flexible than a wooden board but, when you get the hang of it, “you can ollie higher than with a wooden board, opening up new possibilities for tricks”. Aesthetically, the boards “look incredible”. “The fact that each board is unique is so cool, riders will be able to customise their decks with whatever colours they like,” one user added.

The final press is a self-contained heating and pressing machine, which includes safety lights and a heating implement activated with a simple twist thermostat.

Built from steel, the press weighs 200kg in total, stands around 6ft x 6ft, holds an aluminium mould, and is mounted on wheels. Before pressing a deck the inner faces of the mould are coated with a release agent, acting as a lubricant so the molten plastic spreads with as little effort as possible.

It currently takes around two hours to heat the plastic required for one skateboard, but Knight plans to continue developing his design to speed things up. He said: “It’s been proven that there’s a positive correlation between people interested in skateboarding and people interested in sustainability. Yet there’s also this dated stigma going back to the origins of skateboarding subculture that considers skateboarders are a public nuisance.

“I hope that this design, which could allow people to contribute to a local community by collecting waste while creating something really cool, might go some way in helping challenge that stigma.”