4.5 Trillion Cigarettes Littered, One Simple Solution

Watch The Cigarette Surfboard documentary here.

If you feel like you’ve been hearing about the “Cigarette Surfboard” project forever, it’s because you kind of have.

It all started in 2017 when the Surfrider Foundation and Vissla ran something called the “Creators & Innovators Upcycle Contest”. The winner? A 17-pound surfboard made out of 10,000 littered cigarette butts, made by an industrial design undergraduate named Taylor Lane and built with his friend, documentarian Ben Judkins — who you might know from Ben’s producing of Stab’s “Joyride” series, among other Stab projects.

From there, the “Cigarette Surfboard” went mainstream: The New York Times, NPR, NBC, and ABC all covered the project. Ben and Taylor then crowdfunded a modest $20k with the sole purpose of creating a 90-minute documentary. They soon realized it would take a lot longer and cost a lot more than that.

“We thought it would take us a year, maybe a year and half,” Ben laughed, “Nine years later, it’s finally out. We way overshot. We shot around 500 hours of footage, did over 100 interviews, and ended up doing more fundraising campaigns on top of us putting a bit of our own money into it. On top of that, COVID hit in the middle of it all, which stalled things as well. We just didn’t know what we didn’t know. Post-production is more expensive than we imagined too — sound, color, editing, all of that. And we also had our normal jobs on top of this. I actually don’t think I could have edited this film without practicing on 30-minute Stab projects over the years — every video is a puzzle you have to learn to piece together.”

Now, 130 in-person screenings, 60+ film festivals, 16 festival awards, and one fight with the Big Tobacco lobby later, the Cigarette Surfboard Documentary is out for everyone to see.

“There’s great surfing in the movie (Caity Simmers, Rob Machado, Mikey February, for example) and the boards do work — it was Taylor’s main goal to get the boards down to seven pounds instead of 17 like they started — but the main goal of the film is to shed light on how simple, individual acts like just flicking a cigarette really adds up and affects the ocean and coastal communities,” Ben said. “Cigarettes are the single most littered thing on Planet Earth — 4.5 trillion cigarette butts are littered every year. So the cigarette surfboard is just a symbol of the greater problem.”

One challenge about making an environmentalist documentary over a 10-year period is that the “Overton window” has shifted from earnest, Millennial pleadings about individual accountability to a post-ironic smorgasbord of Gen-Z angst and cynicism directed at the fact that the term “carbon footprint” was invented by British Petroleum’s PR team to point the blame away from the Death Star and toward Main Street.

But, despite the change in tone, there are also bulldozers entering National Parks, data centers threatening to barbecue the Great Salt Lake, and record coastal erosion that prompted San Clemente, California to declare a “State of Emergency” for the first time due to its lack of sand last week. There’s never been a more important time for this film to come out.

“There’s a lot happening in this world right now, and it’s easy to feel overwhelmed,” Ben said. “But if we surf every day, it’s kind of our obligation and in our self-interest as well to stand up for the ocean. And one thing we realized is that having fun is a more sustainable way to spread awareness. Like Jack Johnson told us, ‘It’s about enjoying this process of finding a solution.’ So, getting people together, doing surfboard demos, having fun film premieres, it’s all a part of pushing the environmentalism movement forward.”

One unexpected thing that happened over the past nine years is a run-in with Big Tobacco lobbyists and the passing of real legislation that bans single-use cigarette filters in some Central California towns like Santa Cruz and Pacifica. “We can pick up cigarette butts and do beach clean-ups all day, but with trillions of littered butts every year, preventing them from being there in the first place is the best approach,” Ben said. “We organized with local surfers, activists, and business owners and went to city council meetings and spoke against Tobacco company representatives — eventually leading to the first law of its kind that bans single-used cigarette filters in Santa Cruz county. It’s a small area, but it’s a model for other communities and its an effort led by surfers.”

The Cigarette Surfboard Documentary is now available to watch for a small fee at this link. All proceeds support the effort. This is the first ever digital release of the film since this whole thing began almost a decade ago.

It’s a great way to support a friend of Stab and more importantly support a a lot of work directed towards and effort that directly benefits us as surfers.