Is The Wave Pool Boom An Environmental Disaster?

Wave pools are popping up all over the globe with an estimated 100+ set to open in the next 10 years.

The purpose of this article is to explore the environmental effects of wave pools in the context of surf culture and society.

If you want to skip ahead and not read the whole thing (we hope you stay) here are the short-attention-span bits: wave tanks are less damaging in many ways than golf courses or your local Home Depot, and are pretty close to an ice-skating rink carbon footprint wise.

But they might also be a green Trojan horse hiding the earth-destroying capitalist machine that won’t rest until it paves and profits from the earth’s last remaining resources. Or something like that…

To counter this beast (or keep it hidden, depending on your perspective) most wave pool operators and builders take extreme measures to be as sustainable as possible. The Wave in Bristol is powered by wind energy and Kelly’s by solar. Contrary to that is something like the bootleg Surf Ranch in China which, like most of the country, runs on fossil fuels. If a wave pool project is an environmental offender then surfers, at least in places with established surf cultures, will sniff it out. 

Yes. We tend to have higher enviro standards than golfers and hockey players. And this is central to our conflicted fabric.

We spit out facts about microplastics and recycled materials, but we will still chase swell up the coast. Maybe it’s done in a Prius, or maybe in a 4×4 fully kitted out, or maybe a gas guzzling rig designed primarily for #VanLife posts. Then there is the toxicity of surf hardware itself.

Surfrider Australia and America have not come out against wave pools, instead continuing to focus resources on coastal access, ocean protection, and plastic pollution. Surfrider Europe is opposed to surf tubs, releasing a document last year outlining their position.

A representative of Surfrider EU told us the anti-pool statement began after would-be developers in France were implying that Surfrider supported their wave tank proposals. Surfrider nipped that in the bud then went further, saying that surf parks as a species are dinosaurs.

“We are against surf parks because in the context of climate change (weather instability, such as drought), biodiversity loss, fossil fuel dependency of modern societies and at the same time the decline of fossil fuel availability, it’s time to rethink the way we live (work, leisure, food, travel, etc.),” they told us. “And to reconnect our practices with the ecosystems that surround us instead of trying to have and do everything everywhere.”

Skip Taylor of Surf Park Management says that currently, all developers in the wave park space come from a surfing background. He trusts this will serve as a moral compass when guiding a developer in their decision-making process.

“These are facilities that require a lot of power and have a substantial footprint, but I am seeing great efforts with developers in using the right building materials, landscape planning, solar integration, and most importantly ongoing operational practices,” said Taylor. “Ultimately it is a deep mindset held by surfers as custodians of the ocean and the environment that we believe is carrying over to most projects as opposed to developers of traditional recreational facilities like hockey, golf, etc. We hope that most surf parks will take actions beyond local regulations and mandates to ensure things are done right on an environmental level.”

Taylor’s last point illustrates that while surfers hold themselves to higher standards, the surf park approval process still lies on the local government level which answers to tax revenue, re-election campaigns, and the occasional Karen.

So how do you know if a wave pool project is a hot mess of a carbon footprint or a shining example of eco-ethos?

To find out, we broke down how wave pools harm the environment and dug up comparable stats. Then we laid it out into three sections: co2 emissions and land loss during construction, electricity and energy consumption, and water use. We also tasked the wave makers with providing us with information about their consumption of resources.

Shall we? 

Construction: Land Use and co2 Emission

In the last 20 years, more than 11 million acres of US farmland was converted, fragmented, or paved over by development projects according to the American Farmland Trust. France doesn’t want the same thing to happen across the Atlantic. 

“Their (wave pool) construction implies land artificialization (pool, parking, roads) on natural or agricultural areas,” Surfrider Europe said in the statement. “This artificialization contributes to habitat destruction and adds to the decline of biodiversity.”

A few proposed wave pools in France have been nixed so far on the artificialization argument. La Bergerie wave pool in Saint-Père-en-Retz planned to convert a cornfield into a PerfectSwell tank while Les Castets, just inland from Hossegor, and a contentious proposal near Boardriders HQ in St. Jean de Luz are nearly dead from local group opposition.

Wave pools plonked on pristine land do strip away those plants that have the capacity to store significant amounts of carbon. But not all plants are equal in reducing carbon. Lawns don’t do much to absorb co2. Algae does a great job, and so do most large trees.

“Our site was originally low grade, unimproved grassland,” says Nick Hounsfield, CEO of The Wave. “The designs for the landscape and planting has set out to increase the biodiversity and habitat areas, by creating over time, new native woodland areas, planting new native hedgerows, wildflower, and grassland meadows as well as ornamental planting which will provide habitat areas for insects and invertebrates.”

Surf parks can also repurpose industrial sites. Adventure Parc Snowdonia, that foil wave that only Jordy Smith seems to be able to rip, was built on an abandoned aluminum mine in Wales. Before starting construction, developers bore the cost to do intense environmental cleanup of the site.

On the mainland, a project in Germany, with the help of two universities, will build twin wave pools in Werne on an abandoned coal mine three hours from the North Sea.

“When the mine was closed in 1975 many buildings were removed and the owner rehabilitated the site,” Carl-Luis Scheer of Surfwrld told WavePoolMag. “Since then, the area is an industrial wasteland.”

Palm Springs Surf Club is repurposing an abandoned waterpark. Even Kelly’s breathed life into an empty waterski lake (and a depressing casino.)

Construction: Concrete

Concrete is evil. According to United Nations Environment Programme, construction worldwide accounted for 38 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in 2019. Anywhere from 2.4 percent to 8 percent of that (depending on your information source, as it varies widely in Internetland) is through cement production, the key ingredient to concrete.

Concrete is magic. It made the Sydney Opera House, countless bridge overpasses, skate parks, sidewalks, and everything modern dwelling humans use on a daily basis. You also need it to build a wave pool. A lot of it. And the thickness for a pool with wave action is more than what’s required for your standard Olympic-sized pool.

“Low Carbon Concrete is not yet available for poured concrete, which is what we use the most of,” said Joe Cerrone of Recreational Design & Construction. “With the enormous loads and pressures these surf pools produce and the structures are under, we require our concrete mixes to achieve the highest strength concrete mix available.”

RDC is currently finishing the Palm Springs Surf Club’s main pool.

“On any project we undertake, but especially the surf pools, RDC recycles anything that can economically be recycled, steel, concrete, wood, paper,” added Cerrone. “If we must demolish a building or an old pool in the way of a new surf pool, we recycle all the concrete.”

The company built a Surf Loch wave pool at a private residence in the northeastern United States. For that project, Cerrone says they used close to 100 percent recycled reinforcing steel as well as crushing the granite on-site to be used as gravel rather than having to truck in hundreds of loads of material.

“It’s been my experience that the ownership of these Surf Pools are very sophisticated, they possess a long view on everything,” continued Cerrone. “They encourage us to look at new and different products, alternative power sources and demand we look at another/better way of doing things and not the same way we have been building for over 100 years.”

Both Urbnsurf Melbourne and The Wave in Bristol told us they used recycled material in their builds. For Bristol, they used recycled steel, concrete, and glass and sourced as much as they could locally. Urbnsurf’s Damon Tudor says around the pool they deployed repurposed shipping containers, and that the wave lagoon base used recycled materials in the floor itself (although he didn’t elaborate.)

Operations: Electricity & Energy

The other environmental damage from wave pools comes from the energy used to make waves.

One report said the cost required to push the foil at the Surf Ranch (which purchases green energy, but we’ll get to that later) is between $14-$25 per wave. Wave pool developers are businesses and at the end of the day, they look at the costs of that energy, which varies by geo-location. For example, Hawaii charges 33 cents per kWh while it’s just 10 cents in many parts of mainland USA. 

The Wave in Bristol uses 1,250,000 kWh per year to create waves. For perspective, a full-size ice skating rink uses around 2,000,000 kWh per year while your local Home Depot uses roughly five times that at 10,000,000 kWh annually. The MGM Grand in Las Vegas uses 400,000,000 kWh per year.

Wavegarden insist that their Cove system is the most energy-efficient machine on the market. The Cove produces waves via a series of hidden levers that swing back and forth, benefiting from the inertia like a metronome. Between sets, their tech uses virtually no energy. Their main competitors are the pneumatic producers, Surf Loch, Endless Surf, and PerfectSwell. These companies counter that waves are still produced during slow periods at a Cove, but go unridden. The pneumatic’s ability to create exactly the right number of waves per customer per session makes them the most energy-efficient, despite a slightly higher electricity-per-wave output. Currently, there is no standard measurement like Miles Per Gallon for wave creation to get an apples-to-apples comparison.

But how those kilowatt-hours are generated is a key component in this equation. Iceland uses 51,699 kWh per person per year. Icelanders are energy pigs, but the country uses clean geothermal power. In China, the average citizen uses less than a tenth of that at 4,500 kWh per year, but 87% of that energy comes from the burning of fossil fuels.

So why don’t all surf parks use clean energy?

Urbnsurf in Melbourne told us their energy contract guarantees the use of 100% renewable sources. The Wave in Bristol went on record to state they are powered by 100% renewable energy via local company Ecotricity.

“Our energy supplier generates 99% of their electricity from wind power (and 1% from solar), which is the way waves are created in nature,” said Nick Hounsfield CEO of The Wave. “We are essentially harnessing nature to create our waves!”

Hounsfield adds they’ve installed solar thermal panels to pre-heat water, added an air source heat exchanger and future-proofed the building to add photovoltaic panels once solar is approved by the local council.

Wave Park in South Korea, with its 56 module Cove design, taps a waste-to-energy facility that burns trash. The plant delivers electricity to Wave Park and heats their water in the Wintertime.

“The heating system uses the steam generated from the Siheung Green Center which incinerates waste,” said Euna Kim of Wave Park. “The pipes are embedded in the ground beneath Wave Park and run 2.6 kilometers to the facility to consistently transport steam.”

Wave Park is fortunate enough to be neighbors with a closed-cap waste incineration facility. But not all projects have this easy access.

Nick Edelman of Aventuur, a development company specializing in wave pools, said the main block to using renewable energies is the market dynamic itself since many global economies still rely on oil production and consumption.

“So there’s really no reason to continue to use coal from both an environmental standpoint and an economic standpoint,” said Edelman. “The technology is there. But then it just becomes a sort of protectionist type thing where you can look to phase out the older resource industries but then you have to make sure those workers are taken care of and provided other opportunities.”

One report found that in Europe and the UK renewable energy is becoming more accessible with 40% of Britain’s electricity coming from wind and solar. However, only one in ten energy suppliers on a worldwide scale has prioritized renewables over fossil fuels.

Edelman adds that in locations where the purchase of renewables isn’t available through local utilities, solar and natural storage would allow individual wave pools to bank the energy they generate onsite. He sees many projects doing this in the near future.

Operations: Water

The average American family uses more than 300 gallons (1100 liters) of water per day with 30 percent of that use outside of the home, especially in drier parts of America and where there are water-intensive landscapes. All told, that’s 33,000 gallons (12,500 liters) per household per year on outdoor use. The DSRTSurf project in the Coachella Valley will use 24 million gallons (90 million liters) each year, about the outdoor water use of 727 households.

“Our surf pool holds roughly 7 million gallons of water (26 million liters),” said DSRTSurf in a statement. “Between evaporation, filtration, maintenance, and other ancillary items, we will use roughly 24 million gallons each year. While this sounds like a lot, 24 million gallons is roughly equivalent to just 1.3 holes of golf at the average 18 hole course in the Coachella Valley.”

DSRTSurf is giving up low-traffic areas of the property’s existing golf course to native fauna. Through this measure, they will not use more water than is being used now.

“Each wave-making technology uses a different amount of water. The DSRTSurf project will use a Wavegarden Cove. Palm Springs Surf Club uses Surf Loch technology.”

“The only water we will lose is to evaporation and spillage,” said Cheyne Magnusson of Palm Springs Surf Club. “Once we fill the pool there is no need to drain it unless we have to work on the concrete which (knock on wood) shouldn’t really happen ever.”

Magnusson said their lagoon contains roughly 3 million gallons (11 million liters) of water which comes from two aquifers that sit under the former Wet N’ Wild waterpark. The water gets filtered through the desert water plant located next door to the surf park.

For the deserts outside of California — in this case, Arizona — water is always an issue. But it’s not the same issue.

“Where our water is coming from is rather complicated, but in short the Phoenix Valley sits on one of the largest aquifers in the US,” says Matt Gunn of Revel Surf Park. “We will be pulling our water from the ground on-site, which draws on replenishment efforts happening in the same location. We are part of a local water replenishment system, which replaces the same amount of water that we will use.”

In most of the US, land ownership above a ground aquifer allows that party to use that water. The problem is, that the water doesn’t stop at the property line. Everyone shares the same water table. In dry areas, where the table supplements supply during drought years, drawing too much from this source is like overdrawing funds at the bank.

Both banks and water are regulated by the government.

“Due to water regulation and city water systems that include replenishment efforts, the area is in a good position related to water,” added Gunn. “Sometimes this understanding is contrary to popular belief during times of drought. Water in Arizona is also tightly regulated and achieving the correct water rights for use in our lagoons has been challenging to navigate.”

The water use decision is left up to government agencies. If an agency believes an area can’t lose that much water to a wave pool, they will rule against it.

Katie Evans, communications and conservation director at the Coachella Valley Water District explained in a recent article that their agency’s job is solely to look at water use on a proposal-by-proposal basis.

“The Coachella Valley Water District is not a land-use agency, and doesn’t have the authority to approve or deny any type of development,” Evans told the Coachella Valley Independent. “Instead, our role is to evaluate the water supply assessment and then provide the information to the land agency about our findings. Whenever a development comes in, they are required to evaluate the amount of water they are going to be using through formulas, and (by studying) past demand, building practices and plumbing codes, and provide that information to us.”

Recently Evans’ agency approved water use for the Thermal Beach Club, a pneumatic wave technology planned near a low-income area north of the Salton Sea.

The other option is to build a wave tank solely in areas with sufficient rainfall. The Wave in Bristol said that in the rainy British climate, water use isn’t the same issue as it is in a desert. Urbnsurf added the same. Damon Tudor said water wasn’t the same issue as elsewhere but added there’s always room to do better.

“We use Mains water currently and have made some improvements in our water treatment,” said Tudor. “This is where anything like backwash requirements has been reduced considerably.”

The Future

In a sustainable world, we all live close to the beach and bike down to our local, pull on Yulex wetsuits, apply organic wax to a board purchased second hand and be thankful we’re not golfers. But that’s not us today.

The sticky part with wave pools is that there is nothing stopping someone from building the Las Vegas Strip equivalent.

While Surfrider EU has gone for stopping surf parks at the point of conception, the final decision sits with local councils and zoning boards who see tax revenue and jobs. In other words, it’s filtered through law and board members seeking re-election in our capitalist structure. And I doubt that a group of surfers would show up to protest a Home Depot or hockey rink on the principle that it’s time for society to rethink our approach to land development and resource use.

It’s not constructive to paint all wave pools in broad strokes as “bad.” However conflicted we may be about surfing’s role in sustainability, it’s still our job to judge each new project on its own merits.