Perhaps the biggest issue facing the future of snowboarding is climate change and rising global temperatures. What initiatives is your company working on to help minimize your footprint and spread positive change? How effective do you think our industry can be in having an impact on people's behavior and spreading awareness that leads to changed habits and general awareness?

One of the biggest ways that we as individuals and even more so as companies, with their collective power, can help the environment is by conserving energy. From a business stand point, there's also the added benefit of saving some serious coin, so this is a real win-win. There are a ton of great websites out there that include numerous tips for saving energy wherever you may be. http://www.energysavers.gov/ is a good one that the feds have posted. One of the biggest wastes is conventional, incandescent light bulbs. Switching to compact flourescents is a quick, cheap and effective change. There are also tons of consultants out there if you have a budget for this, but little upgrades and general consciousness are a good place to start.

I think all this goes far beyond changing light bulbs around the office, but that is all good. The industry really needs to examine the whole supply chain. 90%, guesstimate, of snowboard products are being made in China, the amount of fossil fuels it takes to get shipped here is huge, and then we turn around and ship it all out again. The shipping industry is one of the biggest polluters in the world, spills, illegal dumping of waste in international waters, the use of cheap bunker fuel. It has be documented that in the port of Vancouver on any given day of ships sitting idle in the port emit more emissions then all the cars and trucks in the Vancouver area combined on the same day.

It is a very slippery slope we are on, more and more ASI companies are getting bought out or acquired by Wall Street. In an overly saturated market companies increase there profits by increasing margins, how do you increase margins, out source and increase production and squeeze every penny out of your products by trying to get the most for the least.

Being a product developer I know how hard and expensive it is to make products environmentally friendly and when companies do make these products, does it really make a difference? The carbon footprint in shipping that green product here from overseas off sets any advantages the product gained in being produced with “green materials”. It not just the product but the entire process, right down to the type of energy that the product is being made with, if the factory uses coal fire energy well I don’t think the fact that the soles of the shoes being made from hemp really brought us that much closer to salvation.

I am also sure the ASI is being very calculative, look at what happened to Lululemon, the media is ready to pounce on the next company that is being “marketed” as green, also look what happened to their stock in the wake. That is the irony of the situation, in most companies the whole “green” movement seems to start out in the marketing and PR department as apposed to the Development Department. If company x puts out one or two “green” products they are just trying to change the perceptions of the brand in the mind of the average consumer who see these products being released from company x and they assume that the whole company is green which most of the time is very far from the case. Most companies in this industry are just trying to change the perceptions of their brand as apposed to taking real steps to fixing the actual problem, the supply chain.

Just to put things in perspective, how many gallons of fuel did ASR, SIA, OR & ISPO use not only to get all the product and booths to these places but the people too. The best thing we can do as consumers, is really ask yourself when you are shopping if you need the product you are about to buy or is it surplus or excess. Remember the hippy values of the 3Rs, reduce, recycle, reuse. And my new addition “Curb your Consumerism”.