“A surfer is one with the sea, few sportsmen experience the same feeling of profound belonging to nature. Water, wind, the seabed, sunrises and sunsets, the birds that keep you company in the long lonely waits. A surfer cannot help but feel sustainability as necessary. We were just waiting for the technology to be ready. It has finally arrived. Or rather, we went to provoke it”. Five years of study, experimentation, standstill and discovery for the team of innovators led by engineer Alessandro Danese.

A bet rewarded by facts: Alterego Surfboards boards are unrivaled in the world of sustainability. A journey into the heart of these magnificent wave-flying instruments is enough to realize it. The pad, the small surface at the stern that guarantees grip and stability to the driver's foot, is made of cork. The pad is in contact with a layer of biological resin, a coating that wraps two layers of rock fiber, in turn necessary to protect the soul of the board, a 100% compostable material crossed by a cork structure and a fiber lamination basalt. It is the "Bi:o'cor:k" technology, which earned Alterego the prestigious international ISPO Brandnew 2021 award, dedicated to the production of sports technology. Skimboards, the boards that glide on the thin foam of the surf, are made from the waste material, and already a project exists for the scraps derived from compostable, which the production team orchestrated by Michele Piga imagines to reuse after a degradation process on the ground.

“The icing on the cake, recently developed, are the biodegradable plastic boxes for the fins, built with 3D technology by a group of students of the Cagliari faculty of architecture, all in their twenties”, says Danese. Not just sustainability, of course. The combination of materials guarantees the boards extraordinary stability, maneuverability and resistance. You can literally jump on the board resting on the ground on the stern and bow vertices, without the structure suffering in the least.

It is no coincidence that Alterego was born in Sardinia. From Alghero, where the company has its production hub, and for hundreds of kilometers of coastline up to the southeast coast, the island is blessed by the winds: the mistral and the libeccio that sweep the Gulf of Oristano and the Sulcis area, the Sirocco that raises the waves in Nora and Cagliari, the east and the icy Grecale, which flows from the north-east and invests the spots in the south. For all Italian and European surfers, Sardinia is known as the "Hawaii of the Mediterranean", a miracle of wind and waves that over the course of a year is repeated on average two days out of three. A miracle to be preserved, Danese emphasizes: "The sea, be it our Mediterranean or the oceans, gives man harmony, economic well-being and beauty. Today we have the technology needed to make table sports sustainable. It is no longer possible to wait. We must make our contribution, the perfect wave is growing on the horizon".