Surfboards built from cigarette butts hit Praa Sands

From a distance they look like any other boards on the water. Up close, you see what they are made of: thousands of cigarette butts pulled off beaches during clean-ups.

That was the sight at Praa Sands when an international project called Surfing With Me brought its expedition to the Cornish coast for the final leg of a European tour, and the local surfing community came out to meet them.

What Surfing With Me is doing

Surfing With Me is run by the Moving The Planet Foundation and sponsored by Turismo de Tenerife. The project uses surfing to push a single message: cigarette butts are one of the most common and most harmful things polluting beaches and oceans.

The boards are the centrepiece. Each one is built from thousands of cigarette butts collected during beach clean-ups, turning litter that usually ends up in the sea into something people stop and look at.

The Praa Sands stage

The UK visit landed at Praa Sands Beach. While they were there, the team filmed content for the Surfing With Me documentary series, showed off the cigarette butt boards, and met local surfers, surf schools and people from the coastal community.

The foundation thanked several people who helped make the Cornish stage happen: Makai Surf School, Steve Hancock, Ben Neville, Duncan Trevillion and Sol Hawkins.

The end of a European tour

The Praa Sands visit was the last chapter of a journey that connected surfing communities across Spain, France, Portugal and the United Kingdom. The idea running through all of it is that sport can get people to care about their own coastlines and act on it.

Cigarette butts remain one of the most polluting forms of litter found on beaches. The boards that surfed Praa Sands were made from thousands of them.