Álvaro Morety, a Chilean surfer and architect, created a surfboard made from the sub-Antarctic seaweed called cochayuyo and began selling them online ten days ago. Yuyo Surfboards, which is the name of the company, describes itself as “an innovative project” in its LinkedIn profile.

According to what the entrepreneur told the local site Chile Surf, This is his “life project”. “The purpose, mission and vision of the company are at the same time the way we live life. We don’t make surfboards, we save the sea. We do everything by innovating and mixing art, nature and spirit. I can say that our company is a cause.”

Cochayuyo is an algae found in Chile, New Zealand and the South Atlantic, and based on it, the architect developed a sea-friendly semi-organic foam that reduces the presence of components compared to conventional foam used in the production of surfboards, he describes on LinkedIn.

The idea came about in 2011 in a workshop where the architect was studying at the University of Talca. A year later he presented it in an ideas competition in which he won a prize. “The fact that so many people from different backgrounds supported the idea to a greater or lesser extent was fundamental in giving me resilience. From the first scale blocks, you could already see signs that I was on the right track, we could stand on them and they would remain intact. Later, with the support of the Production Development Corporation and the University of the Border, mechanical tests were carried out, obtaining very favourable results in terms of bending and compression forces, which continued to indicate that everything was on the right track,” said the surfer in the interview.