“Be more in tune with the image of sport”

Nearly 20 years after the launch of the brand, Notox sells a few hundred eco-friendly surfboards each year. A confidential activity carrying a much broader message.

A break at the coffee machine can sometimes lead to great ideas. This is what happened in 2005 when Pierre Pommiers and his future partners, then office colleagues in a robotics company and all surfing enthusiasts, discussed the manufacture of boards.

A few months later, Notox was born. “We discovered that there were a whole bunch of unfriendly, unrecyclable, polluting and dangerous materials in traditional surfboards. We said to ourselves that we were going to do something more in line with the image Sport”, remembers Pierre Pommiers, co-founder from Notox.

Pollutants in classic boards

“We quickly realized that to make a traditional surfboard, we bought 9 kilos of material for a product that ultimately weighs 3 kilos. There is a huge loss of material with pollutants that are impossible to reuse,” explains Pierre Pommiers.

Among the most used pollutants, “polyurethane foam, with styrene, which is a very powerful solvent, also glass fibers, which look a bit like asbestos when they are in the dust state, explains the founder of Notox. So we replaced that with recycled polystyrene and by natural linen fibers.

Eco-friendly surfing is therefore “a little more expensive to manufacture, because it takes more time. Everything is done only to order. It costs between 600 euros and 2000 euros. And we make between 300 and 500 boards per year.”

The hope of seeing the mark at the Paris Games

At Notox, everything is claimed to be made in France. The company based in Anglet, in the Basque Country, sources its supplies from Aquitaine, or Brittany in particular. Flax fibers are currently grown on the border, in Belgium, but soon in Normandy. On the recycling side, there is aeronautical waste, coming from Airbus, which is also used.

Finally, will we see the Notox boards at the Paris Games, near Tahiti? Pierre Pommiers hopes so, with Céline Rouillard in parasurfing, an athlete suffering from multiple sclerosis who started surfing in 2015, and who has been collecting medals since then (bronze medal at the parasurfing world championships in November 2023).