At the neon-pink-walled factory of Soul Stix Surfboards, in the surf ghetto of San Clemente, Calif., a computer-controlled circular saw shapes a 5-foot-9-inch board from a slab of polyurethane foam. As the blade slices, a blizzard of snow-white flakes floats onto an already headhigh mound. “We’d been trying to figure out ways to get rid of this stuff without putting it in the landfill, like we’ve been doing for years,” says Jerry O’Keefe, Soul Stix’s owner.
Now O’Keefe and his colleagues have an answer: They donate their “shaper dust” to a startup called Monarch Green, which happened upon a tidy business recycling one form of toxic waste to clean up another. Monarch–founded in 2010 by Steve Cox, a surfer and inventor, and Tom and TJ Rossi, a father-son commercial real estate development team–uses shaper dust to create a powdery material called Spillinex, which can quickly absorb harmful chemical waste. Seconds after it consumes a spill, the powder balls up and floats away for easy recovery.
Cox stumbled across the idea at his previous company, Green Foam Blanks, which makes surfboard blanks (the foam core of a surfboard) from recycled polyurethane waste. In April 2010, eight days before BP’s Macondo oil well blew up in the Gulf of Mexico, two quarts of hydraulic fluid spilled in the factory. When Cox tossed a handful of poly dust on it, the mess disappeared in seconds, and he knew he was on to something. “I got some old oil from a mechanic’s shop and went to this stagnant pond I knew and put in a quart and threw the material on it and it bonded immediately,” says Cox, 52. “I was able to scoop it out, and it left the water completely clear.”
Source: Forbes
By Todd Woody