Snowboard brands have done the hard sustainability work. Now they need to explain it.

I’ve got a confession.

I’ve bought over 1,000 snowboards. I’ve trained as a B Corp consultant, I work in sustainability marketing and I’ve been riding for 30 years. And I couldn’t tell you, in plain words, what makes a conventional snowboard core worse for the planet than a certified one.

If someone this close to the product can’t follow the story, most people standing at the shop wall have no chance.

That’s a commercial problem. Riders are some of the most environmentally conscious customers any industry could ask for. Brands have spent years building exactly the products and programmes those customers want, then described them in a language nobody reads, in places nobody looks.

And since 27 September 2026, in Europe, it’s also a compliance problem.

Which might be the best thing to happen to sustainability marketing in snowboarding for years.

What I learned buying 1,000 snowboards

From 2008 to 2018 I ran a snowboard travel company in the French Alps. What started as a few mates, an idea formed in the pub and a lease on a tumbledown chalet ended up as a multinational chain. Along the way I made myself the snowboard buyer, because it was a lot more fun than spreadsheets and compliance.

Those buying meetings were simple. Sizes. Rider types. Flex. Park or powder. Price. How many of each.

Like most riders, I cared deeply about the planet. I’d watched reefs bleach in my summer job as a scuba diving instructor, and every November I wondered whether the snow would turn up as the key ingredient for our winter business. My big idea for doing good was giving some profits to tree planting, while glossing over a business built on putting thousands of people on planes. Purpose bolted onto the side of the business, instead of built into how it makes money.

A lot has happened in 10 years, but in all those rep meetings, sustainability never came up. Not once. Not from the rep, and not from me. I was the buyer every sustainability strategy dreams of: willing, worried, and holding the budget for hundreds of boards.

Two things were missing. The rep didn’t know I cared, because I never told him. And when the materials did come up, they came out as resin chemistry and core specs that went straight over my head. A plain-English reason, something like “this board will last longer and still be worth something when you’re done with it”, would have changed my order. Nobody ever offered one.

That was many years ago, so I set out to see whether anything had changed.

Riders care. They just can’t act on what they don’t understand.

I wasn’t unusual among boardriders. In a 2021 study of 251 surfers, 84% described themselves as environmentally conscious.

A 2025 World Snowboard Federation survey found almost the same among young snowboarders, at 73.8%.

But only 20% of those snowboarders consistently acted on it. The surfers turned up for beach clean-ups, but fewer than a quarter tried to fly less, and half bought a new surfboard every year or two.

Look up “intention-action gap” in the dictionary and you should find a picture of someone holding a board, surf or snow.

The usual explanation, that sustainable choices cost more, isn’t the whole story here. The single most impactful thing a rider could do is travel less, which usually means riding less. Asking people to give up the thing they love is a far bigger ask than letting them choose a better product while they carry on living the life they’ve chosen.

So the job isn’t convincing riders that the planet matters, and it isn’t asking them to stop riding. It’s giving them something they can understand and act on at the moment they’re actually deciding: the product page and the shop wall.

And there’s evidence the demand is there when the option is clear. US secondhand apparel grew 14% in 2024, five times faster than the clothing market as a whole. In outdoor gear, more than one in five customers who bought pre-owned from Arc’teryx came back and bought pre-owned again within the programme’s first 18 months.

What I couldn’t find is snowboard-specific data connecting riders’ environmental concern to what they actually buy. Nobody seems to have measured it - or at least published and shared their findings. That’s worth sitting with, because it means every brand in this category is guessing.

What today’s product pages say

In October 2026, here at Grounded, we ran a quick micro-audit of 23 flagship product pages on a major US action-sports retailer: 15 snowboards and 8 snowboard jackets, one per brand.

The work is there. 18 of the 23 pages list at least one sustainability feature: certified wood cores, bio-based resins, recycled edges, recycled fabrics, PFAS-free water repellents. That’s years of R&D, and it deserves credit. But it’s written as a list of ingredients, not a reason to care.

Sustainability leads on none of the 23 pages. Only 4 mention it in the opening description, the part a shopper actually reads. Only 5 explain a specific consequence. Only 1 connects a sustainability feature to something a rider would actually feel: a single line about how a flax stringer soaks up chatter and cuts CO2. A benefit you can feel and an impact you can understand, in one sentence. That’s the start of translation.

Where pages did explain anything, it was usually carbon percentages or vague phrases like “eco-friendly” and “low environmental impact”.

The jackets were starker still. All eight carry a recycled or PFAS-free material claim. Not one explains what that means for the person buying it.

And the story riders would understand most easily wasn’t there at all. Durability was framed as performance on 18 pages and as value on one. Five pages listed a lifetime warranty, every one as a bare line in the specs. None mentioned a repair, resale, trade-in or take-back programme.

This is a snapshot, not a representative study: one retailer, one product per brand. But the pattern was hard to miss. The sustainability work isn’t missing. The translation is, and with it the chance to sell that work to a captive audience who already care.

The legal nudge

So we don’t have an R&D problem. We have a translation problem.

And while researching this article, an unlikely ally for fixing it appeared.

Since 27 September 2026, the EU’s Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition Directive has banned generic environmental claims such as “eco-friendly”, “green” and “environmentally friendly” unless a brand can show recognised excellent environmental performance. It also bans claims about a whole product when they only cover one part of it. A claim stops counting as generic when its specifics are clearly and prominently explained on the same medium: the page, the pack, the ad. And it applies to stock already on the shelf.

Brands should take proper advice, but the principle is simple: explain what you did, specifically, where the customer is deciding, in a language they understand. Every brand selling in Europe on generic claims now has to rewrite its copy, weeks before the season. The only question is whether you rewrite it to stay compliant, or to sell more to customers who care.

At Grounded, we call this connecting the “why” of purpose with the “way” of profit.

You’ve done the work twice

Snowboard brands haven’t just done the materials work. Plenty have also built the kind of infrastructure riders understand instantly: durability and circularity programmes.

Burton’s Pass Along takes back boards and outerwear for store credit and resells them, currently through its US flagship stores.

Jones’s Re-Up programme turns any old board into stringers for new ones and gives the donor credit towards a new Jones board.

Patagonia and The North Face have run resale for years.

So the work has been done twice: in the materials, and again in circularity. Neither is reaching the moment the rider gets their wallet out.

The work gets lost in two places.

The first is inside the brand. We spot-checked brands’ own product pages too. Only one put circularity right where the decision happens: Patagonia’s product page offers a “Shop New / Shop Used” choice beside the price, with its repair guarantee and trade-in credit a scroll away. Elsewhere, the programmes lived in a menu, a footer banner or a separate microsite, or didn’t appear on the product page at all. That was even true of my beloved Jones Snowboards, with all its sustainability work and Jeremy Jones being, to me at least, the snowboard industry’s Yvon Chouinard.

The second is the handoff to retail. Most of the opening descriptions we audited were written in the retailer’s voice, not the brand’s. And even the best story doesn’t survive the trip: on the retailer’s page, that same Patagonia guarantee shrinks to two words in a spec table, “Limited Lifetime”.

What good translation looks like

Sustainability marketing gets itself into trouble when it confuses the thing you changed with the reason someone should care.

A bio-resin is an input. A lower-carbon product is a consequence. A board that rides brilliantly, lasts for years and keeps its resale value is a proposition. Translation means moving every claim up that ladder.

Snowboards have no picture of harm the way food has factory farming. So borrow one people already carry around. The best example in our audit was a topsheet described as keeping single-use plastic out of waterways. That’s translation done well.

Use materials as proof. Just don’t make the proof do the job of the proposition.

And notice which claims are easiest to translate and to prove. “Trade it in for credit.” “We’ll repair it for life.” “It’ll still be worth something when you’re done.” Specific, verifiable, and instantly understood by every rider. Circularity isn’t just the strongest sustainability story most brands have. Under the new rules, it’s also one of the safest.

The translation job

Done right, translation and circularity should drive revenue, not cost it.

This is what Grounded’s Sustain-Agility approach is for. It connects the why of purpose to the way of profit, putting high-level sustainability goals at the core of brand strategy and positioning. It runs in four steps.

1. BPP: belief, purpose and pursuits. Our BPP framework starts with a belief that sets up a tension: the problem your brand exists to resolve. For boardsports, that tension is in plain sight: riders who care deeply, and act far less than they’d like to. Your purpose resolves it through three pursuits: the product, the engagement platform and the impact. Most board brands have nailed the product and can describe the impact. The missing link is the engagement platform that lets riders act on what they care about. Trade-in, resale and repair are exactly that.

2. Archetyping: find the claim people care about. Riders don’t buy carbon percentages. They buy how a board feels, how long it lasts, what it says about them and what it’s worth. Archetyping connects your brand narrative to the most motivating claim.

3. The 5Rs: decide what deserves to travel. A team workshop that takes the product or brand proposition apart and decides what to re-use, reimagine, reduce, remove or reinforce. For most board brands right now, I’d expect three of them to do the heavy lifting:

4. Validation: test it with real riders. My instincts come from one chalet business, a lot of rental boards and a few decades of riding. That’s a hypothesis, not proof, and as we’ve seen, nobody has the snowboard-specific data yet. Does “this board keeps its value” mean more to riders than “this board uses a certified core”? Does a trade-in offer beside the price change what people buy? Grounded tests claims like these with real consumers before they go anywhere near a product page.

Then make sure the translation survives the handoff, from the sustainability team to product, sales, the retailer and the product feed. And measure it like a commercial story: conversion, sell-through, resale value, take-up of repair or trade-in, alongside the environmental metrics.

The conversation that never happened

I still think about those rep meetings. Me, willing and worried, holding the budget for hundreds of boards. A rep with genuinely good work behind him, and no way of saying it that I’d have understood.

Nearly twenty years on, the work is better than ever and the translation still hasn’t caught up. The difference now is that Europe has stopped letting anyone hide behind “eco-friendly”. Brands now have to have that conversation with every rider. They might as well make it the one that sells.

Snowboard brands have done the hard sustainability work. Twice. Now translate it, and make it pay.

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Sources and method

About the audit. Grounded reviewed 23 flagship product pages (15 snowboards and 8 men’s snowboard jackets, one model per brand) on a major US action-sports retailer, retrieved 7 October 2026. We coded only the opening description, product details and specs. Where a best-selling model couldn’t be confirmed, we used the highest-listed all-mountain model as a proxy. We also spot-checked brands’ own product pages for six brands, four of which were accessible. This is a snapshot, not a study.

About the regulation. This article summarises Directive (EU) 2024/825 for context only. It is not legal advice.

Environmental claims after 27 September 2026, Coslaw

EU FAQ on Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition, European Outdoor Group

Cultural Dissonance: Surfers’ Environmental Attitudes and Actions, Frontiers in Sports and Active Living, 2021

WSF ZERO Project report, World Snowboard Federation, January 2025

ThredUp 2025 Resale Report, ThredUp with GlobalData, March 2025

Outdoor brands see sustainable profits in resale, Trove (Arc’teryx case study)

Burton Pass Along, Burton

Jones Re-Up Tech snowboard recycling programme

Articulating Brand Purpose: Introducing the BPP, The ANA