Skateboards seem to become less just for sk8er bois and more a genuine means of transportation lately. And why not? It’s quicker than walking, more flexible than cycling, and definitely better for the environment than driving a car. The people from the Dutch company Wasteboards take it one step further: they clean up the environment by making skateboards out of waste bottle caps, each with a unique design.

Instead of melting all the plastic in a pot and mixing it – which would leave a grey or brown mass – the team leaves the usually vibrant colours intact. They stack the bottle caps in a certain pattern in the aluminium mould weighing 70 kilograms, creating various designs. The mould is then heated in an oven. The bottle caps melt in any direction they please, making every deck unique. The whole process takes about two hours.

The bottle caps Wasteboards uses are collected, for instance, at music festivals, or fished from the Amsterdam canals by its parent company Plastic Whale, the first professional fishing company.

During festivals and other events, empty bottles, and subsequently bottle caps, are usually littered around. That’s why the company wants to take their ‘bakery’ to those events and bake skateboard decks on site. They are also thinking of expanding to slumps, where plastic waste is usually a big problem.

A skateboard deck retails for €119.95 and a complete board €179.95. It weighs 1.4 kilograms (3 pounds) and measures 70 x 17.5 centimetres (27.6 x 6.9 inch).

For more skateboards made from interesting materials at Materia, click here, here, and here.

Photos: Wasteboards