All washed up

All kinds o' crap lands on beaches around the world every day. Artist Fran Crowe is making a statement about it by upcycling washed-up debris into tongue-in-cheek products, such as "food" for birds.

While Fran's busy quietly doing what she can to tidy up the Atlantic, over on the Pacific Resurf.org collects broken, dead and abused surfboards as well as waste from surfboard factories. They then pulverize these down to dust and reintroduce a percentage of this by-product into concrete and asphalt mixes to create roads and several other products such as lightweight fireproof roof-tiles that look and feel like regular cement tiles.

In addition to facilitating sales of used boards in order to keep them out of landfills, another Pacific set-up Rerip.com collects damaged, broken and unrideable boards. Their partner Ecocentric Renovations recycles the surfboards and pieces to use them as a filler in concrete for lightweight, non-structural applications. This means your next tabletop, sidewalk or skatepark could contain one of your old used surfboards.