Clean & Green

The world's greenest ski factory?

First of all, we're carbon-neutral and fully renewable on energy use. If you visit our little shop in Placerville, Colorado, you'll recognize us by the impressive array of solar thermal panels on the roof. They provide all our space heating, radiant heating and hot water supply. We buy wind power to run our fluorescent lights, computers and shop tools.

That leaves the product itself. The plastics and resins that go into any ski are derived from petroleum stock. We can't change that. But we can cut waste to the absolute minimum.

First, of course, we use clear, straight–grain, finish–quality hardwood for our cores, rather than injection-molded foam. Wood is a renewable resource. Molding foam uses up a lot of petroleum, and generates a large volume of fairly toxic gas as it expands.

In a big ski factory, the filthiest room is the grinding line, where molding flash (the overflow resin from the molding process) has to be sanded off the ski. This process creates many cubic yards of black chemical dust – it looks and behaves like coal dust. In a typical large factory, this stuff is flushed through drains in the floor and has to be filtered from the discharge flow to prevent going into the groundwater.

Through careful hand assembly and layup, we make sure that we use only the minimum amount of resin to get a bombproof fiberglass structure. The ski therefore comes out of the mold with little or no flash, and we can cut most of it off clean with a carpenter's draw knife. We flush nothing from the floor. We can clean up after a shift with a push broom.